AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5 • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by daveguy » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #215

lmm wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How soon we forget. Twenty or thirty years ago Chess was spoken of in exactly those reverent tones.

I suppose in the era of Bobby Fischer, chess was proxy for superpower one-upmanship. That's long gone, but Chess as a game is still doing fine and I expect that it will be the same for Go. We still have chess tournaments, super-star grandmasters and circus freaks (people who can play blindfolded against multiple opponents). And, yes, computers can easily smoke all but elite players. Why should Go be different?

And, yes, computers can easily smoke all players.

FTFY

In chess the top engines are rated hundreds of ELO points above Magnus Carlsen (top human). No top ranked human vs computer match has been publicised in over 5 years because humans are thoroughly trounced. There are cyborg matches which are interesting. Human + Computer vs Human + Computer because gameplay techniques are considered different. Humans still depend more on higher level goal strategy and less on ruthless positional efficiency (which is probably why they get beat midgame).

What is mind boggling is that 6 months ago no go engine was scratching the surface of professional level go. It took the engines getting a 4-5 stone handicap to be competitive at the lowest level of professional levels.

It looks like this one algorithm has blown through the professional ranks in about 3 months. And a 5-0 victory here would be like 2006 vs 1996 (or even 1993) chess in 3 months.

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

#232

Post by taneq » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #135

imron wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how long before humans start learning from AlphaGo! I want to see AlphaGo vs AlphaGo :-)

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.

I find it interesting that people are using gendered pronouns for AlphaGo. Getting some definite Turing-test vibes here.

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

#233

Post by versteegen » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #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…

90 seconds per move was normal for AlphaGo, wasn't it? I didn't pay attention to how its time per move varies, but it's a question I would love to ask the team (although, maybe it's explained in the paper?)

You have to realise that it's not using an opening book, it's computing the best response from scratch.

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

#234

Post by scarmig » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

piyush_soni wrote: post #84

zamalek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "mad" moves could also be throwing the human off. I wonder how Sedol would fare given a year or so of practice against AlphaGo.

Just that in that time AlphaGo will have played millions of more matches against itself, learning at a much faster rate than him. Not sure, he might still beat the machine though. That needs to be seen.

AlphaGo has already played millions of matches against itself. The obvious low hanging fruit there has already been harvested.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:23 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #157

vedaprodarte wrote: post #109

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.

Developers beat a Go player in the same way civil engineers carry cars across the San Francisco bay.

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by hutzlibu » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:25 PM UTC

gglitch wrote: post #226

BBlarat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yuioup said that the winning player can be called wise, not the game it self. I doubt there are any three millenia old Go players around, but I can be wrong.

I hope you're wrong.

Depends ... I wouldn't mind Laotse being still around somewhere and loughing hard about things going on ...

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

#237

Post by octatoan » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:27 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #98

sgw928 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the only 9p player in the western world, Michael Redmond is of course very impressive. Chris Garlock, on the other hand, doesn't add that much value to the broadcast. Maybe somebody will start a "Left Commentator" meme, just like Left Shark.

It would be great if his co-commentator was a computer scientist who is knowledgeable about AlphaGo's algorithm.

Indeed, I wish someone could talk about how the value/policy thing works.

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

#238

Post by Symmetry » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:29 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #110

tzs wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The fact that Lee Sedols hardware is a couple of pounds of wetware running on a peanut butter sandwich suggests the answer to your question is yes. Whether those insights will come soon or not is the big question.

Hey, that wetware is ten time as powerful as what AlphaGo has to work with. Give or take a few orders of magnitude. And given that Lee's brain only uses a portion of that on Go.

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

#239

Post by fhe » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

As someone who studied AI in college and am a reasonably good amateur player, I have been following the matches between Lee and AlphaGo.

AlphaGo plays some unusual moves that go clearly against any classically trained Go players. Moves that simply don't quite fit into the current theories of Go playing, and the world's top players are struggling to explain what's the purpose/strategy behind them.

I've been giving it some thought. When I was learning to play Go as a teenager in China, I followed a fairly standard, classical learning path. First I learned the rules, then progressively I learn the more abstract theories and tactics. Many of these theories, as I see them now, draw analogies from the physical world, and are used as tools to hide the underlying complexity (chunking), and enable the players to think at a higher level.

For example, we're taught of considering connected stones as one unit, and give this one unit attributes like dead, alive, strong, weak, projecting influence in the surrounding areas. In other words, much like a standalone army unit.

These abstractions all made a lot of sense, and feels natural, and certainly helps game play -- no player can consider the dozens (sometimes over 100) stones all as individuals and come up with a coherent game play. Chunking is such a natural and useful way of thinking.

But watching AlphaGo, I am not sure that's how it thinks of the game. Maybe it simply doesn't do chunking at all, or maybe it does chunking its own way, not influenced by the physical world as we humans invariably do. AlphaGo's moves are sometimes strange, and couldn't be explained by the way humans chunk the game.

It's both exciting and eerie. It's like another intelligent species opening up a new way of looking at the world (at least for this very specific domain). and much to our surprise, it's a new way that's more powerful than ours.

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

#240

Post by Jach » Thu, Mar 10, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

jholman wrote: post #112

kqr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other interesting bit is the combination, the intuition guiding (and evaluating the results of) the logical searching.

I'm still holding out for the discovery of a proof of winning strategy like other combinatorial games. That to me is the logical extreme, not magic evaluation of all states. There are two interesting books on analyzing Go with combinatorial game theory, they found a neat system of scoring in the endgame and can create example boards with one best move that can be found by mechanically applying their system but stumps 9p players (who use whatever systems).