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AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

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Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#41

Post by kevinwang »

panic wrote: post #33
21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

DeepMind is an algorithm which clearly improves a lot on traditional tree search. But how will a better tree search algorithm lead to AI taking over? Why does winning at Go mean AI is closer to taking over the world than when it won at Chess?

ah, but it's not just tree search. It uses neural nets, which makes it different than the chess algorithms.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#43

Post by Eliezer »

panic wrote: post #33
21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

DeepMind is an algorithm which clearly improves a lot on traditional tree search. But how will a better tree search algorithm lead to AI taking over? Why does winning at Go mean AI is closer to taking over the world than when it won at Chess?

It's not an improved tree search. Deepmind was almost pro level purely using the deep learning network before doing any Monte Carlo search.

One way of looking at the significance of this is that it might tell us that relatively simple machine learning algorithms can capture key aspects of the versatile human cortical capacity to learn things like Go using sheer pattern recognition. (It's amazing that human visual cortex can do that.) If the human brain were more mystical in its power, then human-level ability to recognize Go patterns wouldn't have been penetrable at all to a comparatively simple neural algorithm like deep learning.

From another standpoint, this could show that we're reaching the point where, when an AI algorithm starts to reach interesting levels of performance, a much-encouraged Google dumps 100,000 tons of GPU time and 5 months of a few dozen researchers' time to improve the algorithm right past the human performance level. In N years from now when it's a more interesting AI system doing more interesting cognition, we could see a more interesting result materialize when a big organization, encouraged by some key milestone, invests 5 months of time and massively more computing power to further improve an AI system.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#45

Post by chipsy »

panic wrote: post #33
21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

DeepMind is an algorithm which clearly improves a lot on traditional tree search. But how will a better tree search algorithm lead to AI taking over? Why does winning at Go mean AI is closer to taking over the world than when it won at Chess?

It isn't a tree search algorithm.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#46

Post by clickok »

I posted in the earlier thread because this one wasn't up yet[1].

Some quick observations

1. AlphaGo underwent a substantial amount of improvement since October, apparently. The idea that it could go from mid-level professional to world class in a matter of months is kinda shocking. Once you find an approach that works, progress is fairly rapid.

2. I don't play Go, and so it was perhaps unsurprising that I didn't really appreciate the intricacies of the match, but even being familiar with deep reinforcement learning didn't help either. You can write a program that will crush humans at chess with tree-search + position evaluation in a weekend, and maybe build some intuition for how your agent "thinks" from that, plus maybe playing a few games. Can you get that same level of insight into how AlphaGo makes its decisions? Even evaluating the forward prop of the value network for a single move is likely to require a substantial amount of time if you did it by hand.

3. These sorts of results are amazing, but expect more of the same, more often, over the coming years. More people are getting into machine learning, better algorithms are being developed, and now that "deep learning research" constitutes a market segment for GPU manufacturers, the complexity of the networks we can implement and the datasets we can tackle will expand significantly.

4. It's still early in the series, but I can imagine it's an amazing feeling for David Silver of DeepMind. I read Hamid Maei's thesis from 2009 a while back, and some of the results presented mentioned Silver's implementation of the algorithms for use in Go[2]. Seven years between trying some things and seeing how well they work and beating one of the best human Go players. Surreal stuff.

---

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=11251526&goto=item%3Fi...

2. https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/papers/maei-thesis-20... (pages 49-51 or so)

3. Since I'm linking papers, why not peruse the one in Nature that describes AlphaGo? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature1...

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#47

Post by typeformer »

panic wrote: post #33
21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

DeepMind is an algorithm which clearly improves a lot on traditional tree search. But how will a better tree search algorithm lead to AI taking over? Why does winning at Go mean AI is closer to taking over the world than when it won at Chess?

@panic I'm sorry but you don't understand go.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#48

Post by panic »

Eliezer wrote: post #43
panic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepMind is an algorithm which clearly improves a lot on traditional tree search. But how will a better tree search algorithm lead to AI taking over? Why does winning at Go mean AI is closer to taking over the world than when it won at Chess?

It's not an improved tree search. Deepmind was almost pro level purely using the deep learning network before doing any Monte Carlo search. One way of looking at the significance of this is that it might tell us that relatively simple machine learning algorithms can capture key aspects of the versatile human cortical capacity to learn things like Go using sheer pattern recognition. (It's amazing that human visual cor…

Regardless of how good the deep learning network is on its own, the algorithm described in the DeepMind paper is an improved tree search.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#49

Post by visarga »

panic wrote: post #44

It'll be interesting to see what new things we learn about Go itself from DeepMind. The game is very deep, and apparently we haven't found the bottom yet!

Instead of the prize money, if I were Lee Sedol I'd request unlimited play time against the latest AlphaGo.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#50

Post by tunesmith »

I watched the commentary that Michael Redmond gave (9-dan-professional) and he didn't point out one obvious mistake that Lee Sedol made the entire match. Just really high quality play by AlphaGo.

Really amazing moment to see Lee Sedol resign by putting one of his opponent's stones on the board.

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