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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

#311

Post by mark_l_watson »

I just wrote a blogg about this. I was up to 1am this morning watching the game live. I became interested in AI in the 1970s and the game of Go was considered to be a benchmark for AI systems. I wrote a commercial Go playing program for the Apple II that did not play a very good game by human standards but did play legally and understood some common patterns. At about the same time I was fortunate enough to get to play both the woman's world Go champion and the national champion of South Korea in exhibition games.

I am a Go enthusiast!

The game played last night was a real fight in three areas of the board and in Go local fights affect the global position. AlphaGo played really well and world champion (sort of) Lee Sedol resigned near the end of the game.

I used to work with Shane Legg, a cofounder off DeepMind. Congratulations to everyone involved.

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

#312

Post by fmap »

exDM69 wrote: post #186
taneq wrote: 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…

There is a lot of room for improvement with the implementation. The way we are using deep neural networks at the moment is exellent for prototyping, but far from optimal. For instance, this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.00363 shows that you can replace floating point operations by simple bitwise operations without losing too much precision in DNNs for image recognition. Together with a better (that is, compiled, instead of interpreted) representation of the inference step I would expect an order of magnitude improvement at a small loss in precision. More software tuning, especially the kind of low-level optimizations that most chess programs do, should yield another big improvement.

Finally, the hardware we are using to run these programs is insane. Sure the silicon is approaching some hard physical limits, but your processor spends most of that power trying to make old programs run fast...

My prediction is that with enough ressources it is possible to write a Go AI which runs on general purpose hardware that's manufactured on current process nodes and fits in your pocket.

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

#313

Post by pauletienney »

Vespasian wrote: post #280
girvo wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I guess free worldwide information transfer (aka Internet) just opened this era and we are not close to see any kind of stalling (IMHO).

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

#314

Post by pixl97 »

Vraxx wrote: post #299
JabavuAdams wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not obviously stupid, as a bounding argument as we approach physical limits.

That's based on the assumption that computing must exist as silicon transistors. When would we have reached the bounds of computation based on physical limits if we had stuck with vacuum tubes. The point is computation is an abstract concept and not tied to the physical medium that we use.

>The point is computation is an abstract concept and not tied to the physical medium that we use.

That's not exactly true

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

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

#315

Post by aab0 »

ragebol wrote: post #188
codecamper wrote: post #185

A human was beaten with some thousands of CPUS & GPUS. On a calorie level, the human is still more efficient. On a time to learn these skills... going from zero (computer rolls off assembly line) to mastery, the computer wins. Actually maybe the computer wins even on the caloric level, if you consider all the energy that was required to get the human to that point (and all the humans that didn't get to that point, bu…

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.

> but the computer has had much more training samples as Lee Sedol could process in his lifetime.

That's not obvious at all. I don't think you appreciate how rigorous and demanding the training of a Go world champion is, how utterly devoted to Go they need to be: http://lesswrong.com/lw/n8b/link_alphago_mastering_the_ancie...

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

#316

Post by PascalsMugger »

danielbarla wrote: post #92
simonh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regarding your edit, I'd wager that it won't stay true for long. Eventually the single-function problem of orchestrating and directing a bunch of sub-solvers in a similar manner to the human brain will become feasible. At that point true general purpose AI will exist, for all intents and purposes.

And when that happens I guarantee someone will be on HN saying it is "trivial" and "not a real advancement" and "we already basically knew how to do this". Because that's what people say every time something interesting happens in AI, without fail.

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

#317

Post by spot »

j2kun wrote: post #306
cgearhart wrote: post #290

I was really hoping to see a more technical discussion than what I found here in the comments. It's too bad that such a cool accomplishment gets reduced to arguments about the implications for an AI apocalypse and "moving the goalposts". This isn't strong AI, and it was at least believed to be possible (albeit incredibly difficult), but it is still a remarkable achievement. To my mind, this is a really significant ac…

> without having all of the training data in advance What? They certainly trained the algorithm on a huge database of professional go games. It's even in the abstract. [1] [1]: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v529/n7587/full/nature1...

they were amateur expert games from the KGS server.

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

#319

Post by PascalsMugger »

argonaut wrote: post #296
JabavuAdams wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An AI is not going to take over the world by impressing us with its game-playing skills. What if you train an AI to play an RTS where matter, energy, and time are the resources and the goal is to take over the world?

I'm not going to fear an AI whose idea of "the world" is a computer game, an AI that isn't even aware of the existence of the real world, and isn't even aware of the existence of the set of real world actions.

I think, almost by definition, you won't be afraid of anything until it's already coming for you. By that time it will already have the capability to decide your future.

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

#320

Post by forgotpwtomain »

jonah wrote: post #137
Radim wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think AGA had the rights to stream and comment this match. Where did you find this 9p AGA commentary? I don't see it in the list of AGA videos on youtube.

It was live streamed and the archive is now up on The Official AGA Youtube Channel at: AlphaGo ?p vs Lee Sedol 9p, 0400 UTC (8pm PST)[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZugVil2v4w

Thanks for the link. Myungwan Kim's commentary is superb, am I the only one thinking the american guy speaks a bit too much though?
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