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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

#301

Post by poppingtonic »

fhe wrote: post #239

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…

There's an interesting angle to this phrase "intelligent species opening up a new way of looking at the world", which is that we (humans) designed go as a game - a subset of the real world we interact with. Go is "reality" to alphago. The superset of all possible sense data it could have, in principle. Whatever "chunks" AlphaGo uses, if it does use them, all of its policies are built only from subsets of the sense data that is the interactions (self-plays) and inferences from past games. There's nothing outside the game to bring into its decision process. With humans, however, our policies are noisy and are rife with what, for lack of a better term, I would call leaky abstractions.

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

#302

Post by m741 »

gsklee wrote: post #156
Cookingboy wrote: post #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 thin…

On a more realistic side note... Professional Go players devote decades in training ever since their youth, giving up normal educations and lots of other more lucrative opportunities for their lives. It's very easy to imagine their frustrations now that their life-time devotion actually means nothing in front of the AI. It's an upright denial to the way of life they so chose and devoted. IMHO Google should donate the…

Google, should they win, is donating their money to Go charities, STEM education and UNICEF.

So they're doing what you want them to (I can't find a summary of how they're allocating the money across each category). Personally I think the work UNICEF is doing to help women in developing countries is more important than Go charities, but I guess their choices should satisfy everyone.

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

#303

Post by forgotpwtomain »

fhe wrote: post #239

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…

> 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.

I have been watching Myungwan Kim's commentary for the games - and it seems notable that a few moves he finds very peculiar immediately when they are made, he will later point out to as achieving very good results some 20 moves later. So it also seems quite possible that AlphaGo is actually reading this far ahead, to find those peculiar moves achieve better results than from the more standard approaches.

Whether these constitute a 'new way' or not I think depends highly on whether these kind of moves can fit into some general heuristics useful for considering positions, or whether the ability to make them is limited to intelligence's with extremely high computational power for reading ahead.

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

#304

Post by mineshaftgap »

ap22213 wrote: post #262
fhe wrote: post #239

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…

Sometimes optimal solutions don't make sense to the human mind because they're not intuitive. For instance, I developed a system that used machine learning and linear solver models to spit out a series of actions to take in response to some events. The actions were to be acted on by humans who were experts in the field. In fact, they were the ones from whom we inferred the relevant initial heuristics. Everyday, I wou…

When the chain of logic that led to an optimal decision is opaque to the owner of the system that is kind of terrifying.

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

#305

Post by reacweb »

colanderman wrote: post #268
astrofinch wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that some of the unexpected moves were apparently more about solidifying against a loss than increasing the magnitude of a win. Which has its own kind of eerie implication: since AIs (like all computer programs) do what you say, not what you mean, the "intelligent species" can sometimes work really intelligently towards a goal that wasn't quite what you had in mind. (Gets especially interesting…

About a year ago I wrote an AI to play the board game "Hive" (shares some similarities with chess). Because I scored all wins equally, it behaved almost exactly like this. It would simply try to minimize my advantage while always keeping open the possibility for it to win, almost like a cat toying with prey. It never actually would make the winning move – however obvious – until it had no other options! I fixed this…

In go, the purpose is to have more territory than the opponent. There is no point in humiliating the opponent by having a big advantage. I think the aim of the strange moves was to increase the confidence of the program in its advance, not to increase the advance.

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

#306

Post by philh »

colanderman wrote: post #268
astrofinch wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that some of the unexpected moves were apparently more about solidifying against a loss than increasing the magnitude of a win. Which has its own kind of eerie implication: since AIs (like all computer programs) do what you say, not what you mean, the "intelligent species" can sometimes work really intelligently towards a goal that wasn't quite what you had in mind. (Gets especially interesting…

About a year ago I wrote an AI to play the board game "Hive" (shares some similarities with chess). Because I scored all wins equally, it behaved almost exactly like this. It would simply try to minimize my advantage while always keeping open the possibility for it to win, almost like a cat toying with prey. It never actually would make the winning move – however obvious – until it had no other options! I fixed this…

> It never actually would make the winning move – however obvious – until it had no other options!

I'm confused. Why would 'make the winning move' not be the way to maximise probability of winning?

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

#309

Post by versteegen »

sigmar wrote: post #290
ap22213 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes optimal solutions don't make sense to the human mind because they're not intuitive. For instance, I developed a system that used machine learning and linear solver models to spit out a series of actions to take in response to some events. The actions were to be acted on by humans who were experts in the field. In fact, they were the ones from whom we inferred the relevant initial heuristics. Everyday, I wou…

What you said about the expert calling something a bug reminded me of how the commentator in the first game would see a move by alphaGo and say that it was wrong. He did this multiple times for alphaGo but never once questioned the human's move. Yet even with all those "wrong" moves alphaGo won. Didn't watch the second game, so not sure if he kept doing that.

Elsewhere in this thread, IvyMike pointed out [1]:

> I sense a change in the announcer's attitude towards AlphaGo. Yesterday there were a few strange moves from AlphaGo that were called mistakes; today, similar moves were called "interesting".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11257997

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

#310

Post by jonknee »

hasenj wrote: post #140
ludamad wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time, only now are people seeing how its hard for people to play Go against computers. Until AlphaGo I didn't even think computers were close.

Actually computers were already in the top 10 percentile or so. I mean top go playing bots ranked something like 5dan amateur which is very hard to achieve, so it could already defeat most human players.

From being in the top 10% to beating the top player is a gigantic difference. Until AlphaGo computers were indeed "not close" to besting humans at Go.
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