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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

#121
The funny thing about AI at this scale is we don't really know why the computer does what it does. It's more of a inductive extrapolation that we can verify that a technique works for a small problem, so we'll throw a whole bunch of GPU power and data at it and it SHOULD work for a big problem. How it actually works is fuzzy though as there's just a couple of gigabytes of floats representing weights in neural networks. No human can look at that and say: "Oh! I see why it made that move". It's so much data that it becomes kind of nebulous what the AI is doing.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort-of repeating a comment I made last time AlphaGo came up: As far as I know there is nothing particularly novel about AlphaGo, in the sense that if we stuck an AI researcher from ten years ago in a time machine to today, the researcher would not be astonished by the brilliant new techniques and ideas behind AlphaGo; rather, the time-traveling researcher would probably categorize AlphaGo as the result of ten years'…

> As far as I know there is nothing particularly novel about AlphaGo, By that standard there's nothing particularly novel about anything. Everything we have today is just a slight improvement of what we already had yesterday. World experts in go and ML as recently as last year thought it would be many more years before this day happened. Who are you to trivialize this historic moment?

Some experts in Go less than 10 years ago believed it would be accomplished within 10 years. Also, you didn't actually refute his argument. Can you point to an algorithm that is not an incremental improvement over algorithms that existed 10 years ago? MCTS and reinforcement learning with function approximators definitely existed 20 years ago.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'True AI will always be defined as anything a computer can not yet do'

Sort-of repeating a comment I made last time AlphaGo came up: As far as I know there is nothing particularly novel about AlphaGo, in the sense that if we stuck an AI researcher from ten years ago in a time machine to today, the researcher would not be astonished by the brilliant new techniques and ideas behind AlphaGo; rather, the time-traveling researcher would probably categorize AlphaGo as the result of ten years'…

I think the thing that would surprise a researcher from ten years ago is mainly the use of graphics cards for general compute. The shader units of 2005 would only be starting to get to a degree of flexibility and power where you could think to use them for gpgpu tasks.

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

#124
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say both characterizations are accurate. Neither the tree search nor the neural net could have accomplished this on their own. But the essential interface to the algorithm is the tree search: it's picking the best move from a set of legal moves determined by formal game rules. The real world doesn't follow formal game rules. I find it difficult to see the progression from this victory to some kind of real-world A…

> The real world doesn't follow formal game rules. Really? Why not?

Infinite state/belief/world space. Infinite action space. It's not so much that there aren't rules (there are - physics), it's that the complexity of the full set of rules is exponential or super-exponential.

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

#125
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the people saying not to worry ALSO predicted AlphaGo. So let's not get ahead of ourselves.

[Citation needed.] I for one did not say to not worry, and I bet $1500 vs. $2250 on Sedol winning the match before getting cold feet and arbing my outstanding bets down to $400 vs. $700.

Why does Teodolfo even need a citation for that? Are you really suggesting that there is no group of people who believe AI is not a threat to worry about, and believed that AlphaGo would win?

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

#126
post #16
post #8

This is my generation's Gary Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. In many ways, it is more significant. Several top commentators were saying how AlphaGo has improved noticeably since October. AlphaGo's victory tonight marks the moment that go is no longer a human dominated contest. It was a very exciting game, incredible level of play. I really enjoyed watching it live with the expert commentary. I recommend the AGA youtube chann…

I know absolutely nothing about Go, and I enjoyed the deepmind channel and found the commenting very good. I was actually thinking about playing a game with another total noob, just for fun, since the rules can be explained in 1 minute (unlike chess).

I totally recommend it. Learning Go is a beautiful experience.

It is indeed very interesting to play against another new player just to see what you come up with, then do some reading and solve some basic problems (it may even be a good idea to have a look at the easier problems before playing your first game), play more games, read more advanced books, join KGS... It is a very nice rabbit hole to fall into.

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

#127
post #16
post #8

This is my generation's Gary Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. In many ways, it is more significant. Several top commentators were saying how AlphaGo has improved noticeably since October. AlphaGo's victory tonight marks the moment that go is no longer a human dominated contest. It was a very exciting game, incredible level of play. I really enjoyed watching it live with the expert commentary. I recommend the AGA youtube chann…

I know absolutely nothing about Go, and I enjoyed the deepmind channel and found the commenting very good. I was actually thinking about playing a game with another total noob, just for fun, since the rules can be explained in 1 minute (unlike chess).

The rules can be explained in 1 minute, but the game takes some time to just start making sense.

I suggest starting on a 9x9 or 13x13 board. The regular 19x19 has too much strategic depth and noobs feel lost on it.

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

#129
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only remaining are language-related. Natural languages are the next focal point of AI research.

That, and towel-folding [1]. Humans have a pretty clear edge on that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo&ab_channel=RLLbe...

That is actually a really impressive robot.

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'True AI will always be defined as anything a computer can not yet do'

Sort-of repeating a comment I made last time AlphaGo came up: As far as I know there is nothing particularly novel about AlphaGo, in the sense that if we stuck an AI researcher from ten years ago in a time machine to today, the researcher would not be astonished by the brilliant new techniques and ideas behind AlphaGo; rather, the time-traveling researcher would probably categorize AlphaGo as the result of ten years'…

Agreed. People don't realize that all of the huge algorithmic innovations (LSTMs, Convolutional neural networks, backpropagation) were invented in past neural net booms. I can't think of any novel algorithms of the same impact and ubiquity (e.g. universally considered to be huge algorithmic leaps) that have been invented in this current boom. The current boom started due to GPUs.
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