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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

#171

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'…

Human mind... pshaw. You say this "human" thing is special? I don't see it: In my day we also had protons and electrons... all you're showing me is another mishmash of hadroic matter and leptons. So you've refined the arrangement here and there, okay, but I don't see any fundamental breakthrough only incremental refinement.

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has Google talked about the amount of computing resources they're throwing at this match? I'd be very interested to know.

1202 CPUs and 176 GPUs apparently edit: according to the livestream

1202 CPUs and 176 GPUs is the figure mentioned in the Nature paper. But it's important to understand that this is the computer used to train the networks used by the algorithm. It took about 30+ days worth of wallclock to train it. That's about 110 megawatt-hours (MWh) worth of energy required!

During the play, the computational requirements are vastly less (but I don't know the figures). It's still probably more than is feasible to put in a smartphone in the near future. Assuming we get 3x improvement in perf per watt from going to ~20nm chips to ~7nm chips (near the theoretical minimum for silicon chips), I don't think this will work on a battery powered device. And CPUs are really bad at perf per watt on neural networks, some kind of GPU or ASIC setup will be required to make it work.

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

#173

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'…

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.

Something being invented previously doesn't mean that it existed as a matter of engineering practicality; improved performance is some but not all of that. Just describing something in a paper isn't enough to make it have impact, many things described in papers simply don't work as described.

A decade ago I was trying and failing to build multi-layer networks with back-propagation-- it doesn't work so well. More modern, refined, training techniques seem to work much better... and today tools for them are ubiquitous and are known to work (especially with extra CPU thrown at them :) ).

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

#174
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.

It's only been the first round and I'm not throwing in the towel yet. Unlike AlphaGo, Lee Sedol has an opportunity to learn from their opponents since AlphaGo takes about 30 days of wall clock time to train the networks. There will be 5 games during the next week.

Despite my optimism, the writing is on the wall. AlphaGo and algorithms like it will only improve as you throw more CPU time at them. I actually want Lee Sedol to win, not because it would uphold some kind of human supremacy but because I want to see the AI guys put some more effort (and CPU time) into it. It would be a real shame if they'd win on their first attempt.

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

#175

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

Well, that's that then :| Or maybe this will spur the human players to improve :)

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

#176
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's pretty cool.

I wonder how it would deal with a teddy bear or stray piece of underwear in the pile of towels?

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

#177

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

It was designed to be hard to win with the algorithms known to researchers back then. I cannot tell if it has something substantially harder than Go has. High branching factor, deep tree and positions that are hard to evaluate with a simple heuristic are present in Go. Does Arimaa have something else up its sleeve?

I think one of the main things was that you can move up to four pieces (or one piece four times, or two pieces two times, etc) in each turn.

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

#178
post #98

I was at the 2003 match of Garry Kasparov vs Deep Junior -- the strongest chess player of all time vs what was at that point the strongest chess playing computer in history. Kasparov drew that match, but it was clear it was the last stand of homo sapiens in the man vs machine chess battle. Back then, people took solace in the game of Go. Many boldly and confidently predicted we wouldn't see a computer beat the Go wor…

...it was the last stand of homo sapiens in the man vs machine... But who made that machine? I'd say a more precise evaluation would be that the ability to program a machine to assist in playing chess outdid the ability to play chess without such assistance.

Your point is entirely valid, but was already made by the very comment you are replying too..

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

#179
post #127
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many Go players suggest starting with Atari Go (aka Capture Go). It has the same rules as Go, but the starting position is predetermined and the winner is the player to capture the first stone.

You only need to play a few rounds of Atari Go, say 30 minutes to an hour to get a grasp of the capturing rules and then you can move to a 9x9 or 13x13. I'd go straight for the 13x13 because it's not that much bigger but it has much more depth into it without being overwhelming. And many Go boards have 19x19 on the other side and 13x13 on the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_Go

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