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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

#271
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. AlphaGo utilizes the "Monte Carlo tree search" as its base algorithm[1]. The algorithm has been used for ten years in Go AIs, and when it was introduced, it made a huge impact. The Go bots got stronger overnight, basically. What novel thing AlphaGo did, was a similar jump in algorithmic goodness. It introduced two neural networks for 1) predicting good moves at the present situation 2) evaluating the "value" of…

Neural networks have been around for a long time. They basically took two existing concepts of AI and threw some money.

That's true, but the ways to train them and ways to apply them to real world problems have really improved.

It's obvious by just reading Hacker News.

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

#272
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Give it ten years and, between algorithmic optimizations and advances in processing, you'll have an unbeatable Go app on your phone. I find this overly optimistic because of the huge amount of power required to run the Go application. Remember, we're getting closer and closer to the theoretical lower limit in the size of silicon chips, which is around 4nm (that's about a dozen silicon atoms). That's a 3-4x improvem…

How many watts does Lee Sedol's brain require?

About 25.

(2000 kilocalories / day -> ~100W; the brain uses about a quarter of your calories.)

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

#273
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never felt playing against what is suppose to be an entire room of machines (wether Deep Blue or Watson) to be fair. What would be fair is to limit the total mass of the computer to say 200kg and leave it at that. What is effectively happening is AlphaGo is running on a distributed system of many, many machines. Even Watson took an entire room. Google is paying a premium to push AlphaGo to win.

Today a tiny $300 desktop computer can beat any human at chess. It only took a few years after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov game.

Not only a desktop computer. A two year old smartphone would do just fine.

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

#274
post #186
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a proof-of-concept. What they've proved is that the same kind of intelligence required to play Go can be implemented with computer hardware. Before now, software couldn't beat a ranked human player at Go no matter how much computing power we threw at it . Now we can. Give it ten years and, between algorithmic optimizations and advances in processing, you'll have an unbeatable Go app on your phone.

> Give it ten years and, between algorithmic optimizations and advances in processing, you'll have an unbeatable Go app on your phone. I find this overly optimistic because of the huge amount of power required to run the Go application. Remember, we're getting closer and closer to the theoretical lower limit in the size of silicon chips, which is around 4nm (that's about a dozen silicon atoms). That's a 3-4x improvem…

Amongst other things, you're assuming hardware is where the speed will come from. But it's as likely to come from better software.

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

#275
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the computer certainly does not win on the amount of training samples required. The human is at the same level as the computer now for Go, but the computer has had much more training samples as Lee Sedol could process in his lifetime. The next step is to reduce the training time/samples for the computer to get the same performance.

That's silly. Why would you want to put human limitations on the computer? We don't artificially put computer limitations on the human.

I don't think it's silly at all. I think you have a good point about this particular contest, but there are plenty of other applications where training data is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming to collect. One way to proceed is to work on making it easier to collect and curate this data, and another is to work on algorithms that require much less data to obtain good performance.

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

#276
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to put a limit on the computer, not at all. But I do think humans have an edge on computer because at least for now, humans can learn the same skills from less samples (at least in this example: Go) Of course, if there are many samples, the computer can go through those faster, but if there are no samples already and the computer has to learn example by example as humans do as well, humans may still have…

How do you count examples? The computer can generate its own examples by playing against itself. So in theory it needs 0 examples. This is not a useful metric at all.

I would count every played game as an example.

What I mean is that I am more impressed by anyone of anything that can do a task (go, golf, chess, learning a foreign language, doing the dishes even) well with just a single example, or e.g. an hour of training.

Being able to train in solitude is an advantage indeed. You need two humans to do this, but you also need two AlphaGo-instances as well.

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

#277

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 network…

Turn on the debugger and step through it!

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

#278
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…

1) this isn't a single function algorithm 2) the human mind is FULL of ugly, highly optimized hacks that accomplish one thing well enough for us to survive. Don't assume that human intelligence is this magical general intelligence, rather than a collection of single function algorithms.

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

#280
post #250
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do elaborate. I try to base my assumptions (which I accept may turn out to be completely wrong) on physics and experience in working in semiconductors. I just don't see a 1000x+ decrease in the power required happening in a decade or two without some revolutionary technology I can't even imagine. Is this what you meant? I'm sure most people couldn't imagine modern silicon chips in the 1950s vacuum tube era. Bu…

Sure. But so far, we've found that revolutionary step every time we've hit these sorts of walls, and if I was a betting man I'd wager we'll do the same again.

Right, but just as a contrast: Technological progress speed has been at an all-time high since the begin of the industrial revolution.

It might as well slow down again and we have to remember that most humans in history saw little to no advances in technology over their lifetime.

I'm excited for the possibilities modern science opens up but I also think we might reach a point where fundamental progress stalls for a century or two.

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