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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

#151
Beating humans in Go is, in itself, not all that exciting. Go bots have been beating strong humans for quite some time now (just not the very top humans).

There are other implications that make this AlphaGo progress super exciting though. Go captures strategic elements that go well beyond the microcosm of one nerdy board game.

That's the real reason Go has been around for >2,000 years, and why this AI progress is relevant, despite its limited "game domain".

I wrote about it here, from my perspective of an avid Go player & machine learning professional [1].

[1] http://rare-technologies.com/go_games_life/

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

#152

Can someone explain why this is more impressive than a computer beating top chess players over a decade ago? I'm not very familiar with Go, and while there were far more squares on a Go board, it seems less sophisticated than chess to me. Maybe Go has way more moves possible and emergent strategies or something I'm not taking into account.

"The game has long interested AI researchers because of its complexity...the average 150-move game contains more possible board configurations — 10^170 — than there are atoms in the Universe, so it can’t be solved by algorithms that search exhaustively for the best move."

[Source: http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancie...]

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

#154
post #61
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.

Highly optimised single-function algorithms like this are impressive stuff and can lead to useful tools, but that's it. This gets us no closer to strong AI than a tic tac toe program. Until we have systems that can tackle a wide range of fundamentally different problems and independently adapt strategies for dealing with one class of problems to deal with other classes of problems, systems like Alphago will remain on…

You are not a general purpose strong AI either. Your mind could easily consist of a whole bunch of single-function solvers, combined into networked components.

See this interview between Kurzweil and Minsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ3ahBm3dCk#action=share

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's any consolation, there are still tons of things humans are far better at than machines.

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

I see "AI" doing well in games that have simple inputs, a limited range of legal outputs, and relatively easy "goodness" measures.

I see nothing that might be able to tell us why gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass, for example, or any moves in that direction. This "AI" is good at simple games.

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

#156
post #150

Can someone explain why this is more impressive than a computer beating top chess players over a decade ago? I'm not very familiar with Go, and while there were far more squares on a Go board, it seems less sophisticated than chess to me. Maybe Go has way more moves possible and emergent strategies or something I'm not taking into account.

What do you mean by sophistication in this context?

In chess there are various pieces with differing powers, with Go it seems like they all have similar powers. Again, I don't really know the game and might be wrong, but that was my impression.

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

#157

Can someone explain why this is more impressive than a computer beating top chess players over a decade ago? I'm not very familiar with Go, and while there were far more squares on a Go board, it seems less sophisticated than chess to me. Maybe Go has way more moves possible and emergent strategies or something I'm not taking into account.

"The game has long interested AI researchers because of its complexity...the average 150-move game contains more possible board configurations — 10^170 — than there are atoms in the Universe, so it can’t be solved by algorithms that search exhaustively for the best move." [Source: http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancie... ]

Yeah interesting, so mathematically there are more moves in Go than the other games AI players have solved so far.

Thanks for the info.

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

#158
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The more recent results are even more impressive: https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/05/21/deep-learning-robot-mas...

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

#159
post #30
post #17

Does this mean in the next few decades, computers will make better sex partners and companions than any human?

Worrying about the effect of strong AI on sexual relationships is like worrying about the effect on US-Chinese trade patterns if the Moon crashes into the Earth.

Who says? I mean, computers can be used for multiple purposes, and although some applications of AI seem more "noble" or "intellectual" than others, the pursuit of knowledge and sexual relationships are both sense pleasures that we indulge in to make ourselves feel good. On a very large scale, one is hardly more noble than the other.

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

#160

We still have Arimaa. It's designed specifically to make it difficult for computers to play. http://arimaa.com/arimaa/

A computer won the Arimaa challenge last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa

I guess the only thing left is to design a game where you can change the rules of the game as a turn.
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