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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

#181

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 thin…

Now go read "The Player of Games", by Iain M. Banks, to see that idea taken to extremes.

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

#182
What I find fascinating - and I guess this really highlights that I have no idea whatsoever how AlphaGo works - is that at the start of game 2, AlphaGo plays P4, then Lee Sedol plays D16. To a layman, this looks like it would be a very, very common opening. Moreover, it's symmetrical - I'm not sure how that affects things, but my naive intuition is that it makes the game state less complex.

Nonetheless, AlphaGo takes a minute and a half to play its next move. Can anyone explain what on earth is going on during those 90 seconds?

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

#183
post #137

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 thin…

Actually this AI kind of confirms these myths, since its basis are not in mathematics but in neural networks. While it could be argued to be just math, so is the brain, but that's besides the point. The point is, even the programmers have no idea what the AI is thinking. The way it picks moves is very similar to how top professionals do. Intuition is reduced to memories stored vaguely as neural connections.

I fear this is an overly mystical misinterpretation of neural nets. (Standard feed-forward) neural nets are layers of non-linear feature transformations. They take inputs and at each step transform those inputs into a more compact representation, distilling the inputs into their most important factors (and throwing away unimportant factors).

So the most likely explanation is that policy/value nets in AlphaGo have learned to extract - with cold logic - the key factors that make up what humans believe to be "good" board positions.

It has little to do with voodoo about neural connections and magic emerging from the weights. AlphaGo has most likely managed to identify the important factors of good board positions (by seeing tons of examples of good and bad moves/positions). It only appears to be magical because these factors are most likely very complex and inter-dependent.

This is supported by the AlphaGo paper - they report that AlphaGo without tree search is about as good as the best tree search programs (amateur pro level). So AlphaGo has taken amateur-pro-level board analysis ability, and combined it with tree search, to achieve top-player performance..

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

#184
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stored discretely and permanently you mean..

I mean it's not clear in anyway "where" is the intuition, it just sort of magically emerges from the connections and the weights in a way that no one can really grasp. If nothing else, just due to the sheer number of neurones.

Is this just something you're imagining, or did Google's developers explicitly say, "AlphaGo is beyond our understanding. We have absolutely no idea how it makes its decisions"?

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

#185

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 thin…

Now go read "The Player of Games", by Iain M. Banks, to see that idea taken to extremes.

Superb book.

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

#186
post #172

What I really liked about those games so far, and Michael Redmond commentary, is that AlphaGo not only beat Lee Sedol twice, but also Redmond. He is playing the same style as Sedol, he constantly predicts Sedol's moves and he is as surprised and does the same miscalculations as Sedol. He really needs some time to find out when he made a mistake, the same mistake Sedol was eventually doing. This is high class commenta…

> He remembers all the stones and immediately clears his own moves

IIRC that's basic expectation of any Go player at a non-trivial level, starting from the mid-high amateur ranks.

It's completely expected that both players and observers can record the game on a kifu or replay and discuss it immediately after they finish.

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

#187
post #166
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fan Hui has already learned from AlphaGo. He's been playing matches against her regularly, and (perhaps as a result of that) won _all_ his games in the last European championship.

Interesting. Mind if I ask for a source? Where did you read this?

It was mentioned in a recent talk. Here's a link to a few seconds before that comment was made...

https://youtu.be/4fjmnOQuqao?t=2881

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

#189
post #178
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Mind if I ask for a source? Where did you read this?

Heard it. Internal tech talk at Google. (Though I don't think it's a secret. If yes, I just leaked inadvertently.)

You're off the hook.. it was already public ;o)

https://youtu.be/4fjmnOQuqao?t=2881

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

#190

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 thin…

Art is, mostly, domain of knowledge not yet claimed by science. When a technique turns art into science, it means that humans are ready to tackle even harder problems. Think about medicine before and after microscopes. Holy art turned into boring science: huge win for human race.

If an AI won the next Hugo award, I would be rejoiced. It wouldn't mean the end of literature at all; it would mean that humans are ready to produce an even higher form of literature.

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