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AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

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Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#111
post #14
post #11

Lee Sedol seemed to be doing well before he went into extra time (as far as I could follow from the commentators). How is it ensured that this is a fair game given the time constraints? I'm guessing adding more computing power to the AlphaGo program should definitely help it in this regard.

> How is it ensured that this is a fair game given the time constraints? Both players get the same time controls, seems fair to me But if you're saying humans might fare better against computers in a game with a longer time control, I suspect that's true

Time is not a good measure when competing with parallel hardware. Joules would be a much better one.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#112
post #76
post #49

I find it very interesting that to a layperson, the idea of a computer being able to beat a human at a logic game is pretty much expected and uninteresting. You try and share this story with a non-technical person and they will likely say "Well, duh..it's a computer".

Pitch it as a creativity game rather than a logic game. I mean, it's a little bit of both, right?

To me, "creative" is not the right word. Maybe try "intuitive".

As Radim says, of course, the intuition is only relevant when logic fails. However, no computer, including AlphaGo, has sufficient processing power to take the logic-only approach to the, uh, logical extreme (more board states than atoms in the universe, etc etc).

So both humans and computers play by a combination of logic and intuition. Surely Lee Sedol must be incredibly good at both. Perhaps AlphaGo is better than Lee Sedol at the logic part (or perhaps not, but just suppose for the sake of argument).

In this light, what is interesting is that AlphaGo is sufficiently good at intuition, a domain we might have considered uniquely human[0], to complement its ferocious logical power.

[0] I find it foolish to consider anything uniquely human, but a humanist essentialist might make such a claim.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#113
post #101
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing the way chess computers have evolved, this won't be far into the future. There are several tournaments just for chess computers, and it is very hard even for grandmasters to follow every more. Somehow, after a 20-move sequence that appears to accomplish nothing, one side is slightly up, and the rest of the game is decided.

> Seeing the way chess computers have evolved, this won't be far into the future. With chess, there were two breakthroughs. First, there was Deep Blue, which threw massive hardware resources at the problem and achieved world champion level play. That was interesting, of course, but didn't really do anything for human chess, because most humans did not have access to the necessary hardware. The second breakthrough was…

Related, the highest ELO chess program is open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#114
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encountered this many times over the past couple of days haha. I then have to explain that previous AIs, like those in chess largely used brute force computation to simulate each move, while these AIs "actually learn, similar to our brain". Probably not the most scientific explanation, but I feel your sentiment.

There is still tree search going on. However I don't know the details about it. Is it that the deep net works mainly as an evaluation function of the current position? I guess it does more than that right?

They are using Monte Carlo Methods for looking around, more like a tiny sampling, it's an incomprehensibly large space. They have both value and policy (deep) neural nets. Train one to get the sense of good/bad individual board states (value) and one to get the sense of good/bad trajectories (policy, evaluates chains of moves).

Chess has a fairly straight forward ranking of pieces, fairly well established ranking of piece power. A knight is more or less always a knight.

Go, you kinda make up your "pieces" from scratch and there isn't any single common ranking. This makes the problem of even evaluating the board difficult (value), which is a sub step of making your higher plans (policy).

The output of the two dNN help cut off, or prevent the sampling of the bad game states and encourage looking into the fruitful areas.

Here is a (edit: not old) new paper, https://gogameguru.com/i/2016/03/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#115

Human can become tired, emotional and nervous. However, a computer/ software would not have these problems. Especially for Lee, the whole world is looking at him. An "ordinary" human like me won't be able to make the right decisions under this pressure. A great respect to Lee and the Developers of AlphaGo. Good Game!

To address this, has anyone considered pitting AlphaGo against a team of 9p players consulting with each other, and perhaps taking charge of different conflicts on the board?

Part of the reason go is a difficult computational problem is that local conflicts can have global relevance. If it was the kind of thing that could be decomposed easily to different humans then it would be an easier game for a computer to crack.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#116
Someone somewhere asked why a lot of people in the Go community is taking this in a somewhat hard way, here is my hypothesis:

Go, unlike Chess, has deep mytho attached to it. Throughout the history of many Asian countries it's seen as the ultimate abstract strategy game that deeply relies on players' intuition, personality, worldview. The best players are not described as "smart", they are described as "wise". I think there is even an ancient story about an entire diplomatic exchange being brokered over a single Go game.

Throughout history, Go has become more than just a board game, it has become a medium where the sagacious ones use to reflect their world views, discuss their philosophy, and communicate their beliefs.

So instead of a logic game, it's almost seen and treated as an art form. And now an AI without emotion, philosophy or personality just comes in and brushes all of that aside and turns Go into a simple game of mathematics. It's a little hard to accept for some people.

Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#117

A question: Should we take it as "a computer beating a human" or "developers beating a Go player"? I had this discussion with my friends and we have opposite opinions.

It should be "a computer beating the human" in my opinion. It's just like parents bathing in the success of their offspring. Yes, they can be proud, but no, they didn't achieve the "win" themselves.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#118
post #49

I find it very interesting that to a layperson, the idea of a computer being able to beat a human at a logic game is pretty much expected and uninteresting. You try and share this story with a non-technical person and they will likely say "Well, duh..it's a computer".

I encountered this many times over the past couple of days haha. I then have to explain that previous AIs, like those in chess largely used brute force computation to simulate each move, while these AIs "actually learn, similar to our brain". Probably not the most scientific explanation, but I feel your sentiment.

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. Neither chess engines nor go engines use brute-force (that is, exhaustive search). Although go does have a much higher branching factor and that does affect the search algorithm used, the biggest challenge is being able to write good evaluation and move-guessing heuristics.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#119
post #49

I find it very interesting that to a layperson, the idea of a computer being able to beat a human at a logic game is pretty much expected and uninteresting. You try and share this story with a non-technical person and they will likely say "Well, duh..it's a computer".

Most people operate on a moving definition of intelligence as "whatever humans can do and machines can't" (thus ruling out AI by definition). If software started writing bestselling novels, it would soon become a "duh that's just what computers do" matter of fact.

That's why task based notions for general intelligence are rubbish.

Here is what humans can do: When presented with pretty much any task, specified however poorly, they can design hardware and algorithms that can beat themselve at that task.

That's a decent measure of intelligence. A decent measure of creativity is coming up with tasks that make the intelligence part as interesting as possible.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#120
post #49

I find it very interesting that to a layperson, the idea of a computer being able to beat a human at a logic game is pretty much expected and uninteresting. You try and share this story with a non-technical person and they will likely say "Well, duh..it's a computer".

Most people operate on a moving definition of intelligence as "whatever humans can do and machines can't" (thus ruling out AI by definition). If software started writing bestselling novels, it would soon become a "duh that's just what computers do" matter of fact.

Lovelace Test is pretty old though.
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