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Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

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Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#141
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they'll happily enter lines where their pawn structures are shattered... Makes you wonder if computers will essentially ruin all the novelty of innovating and discovering new tricks/strategies in age-old games. No more will genius' have their moments of brilliance and improvisation that lead to a stunning victory or upset. No more will commentators debate and regal over phenomenal victories in ages past. With a compu…

Probably. I think it basically proves that any rule structured game without randomness is solvable.

Games like go and chess are necessarily solveable by definition, right? If you mean solveable in our lifetimes, by current technology, that's something else entirely, and much less likely.

Beating human players in go is like finding a good heuristic for an NP-complete problem. Solving 19*19 go is like proving P!=NP, i.e. we don't even have tools that can approach the problem.

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#142
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As computers are able to evaluate positions faster (and therefore deeper), the "godlike" tactics are dominating over human-style strategy. It used to be that computers played "computer-like" moves because they didn't understand the position. Now, they play computer-like moves because "understanding" the position isn't as important as just being able to see 25+ moves ahead. In a nutshell, positional play in chess is s…

> Now, they play computer-like moves because "understanding" the position isn't as important as just being able to see 25+ moves ahead. I don't think you can "see 25+ moves ahead" in Go. The branchout factor is just too big.

You can prune more effectively. Download a program like Leela and let it analyze some positions. You'll get very deep mainlines just like in chess.

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#143
post #78
post #7

One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My first guess when I saw Master's games was that it was a program like AlphaGo that had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imita…

As computers are able to evaluate positions faster (and therefore deeper), the "godlike" tactics are dominating over human-style strategy. It used to be that computers played "computer-like" moves because they didn't understand the position. Now, they play computer-like moves because "understanding" the position isn't as important as just being able to see 25+ moves ahead. In a nutshell, positional play in chess is s…

I believe you nailed it yes. Notably, computer games do look reasonably humanlike when they're even,for example when playing another equally strong computer. But once they can outcalculate the opponent this disappears.

Compare this to lines that the humans have memorized after deep analysis, like poisoned pawn Najdorf. The play there certainly doesn't look humanlike either.

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#144
post #7

One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My first guess when I saw Master's games was that it was a program like AlphaGo that had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imita…

[deleted]

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#145
post #7

One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My first guess when I saw Master's games was that it was a program like AlphaGo that had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imita…

> had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imitating the moves of strong humans

I just watched a couple of games, and I can't agree. Master's fuseki looks a lot like human fuseki. It plays some original, unusual, confusing, non-human looking moves, yes. It also plays some moves at what would normally be considered the "wrong time" conventionally. But the fuseki still looks highly derived from human games to me -- human with some (sometimes major) tweaks.

When AlphaGo is trained fully from first principles alone, I expect another Shin Fuseki -- a revolution in opening strategy. I would be surprised if Go Seigen, Kitani Minoru, et al had finally discovered optimal opening strategy at the beginning of the 20th century (developments since then have mostly been small refinings of what was started in the Shin Fuseki era, not revolutionary).

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#147

Wonder when we will see AI tutors appear? Seems like there is a massive potential to train an AI super player then have it teach you. Does anyone know of such tools yet? Guess there are probably many AI augmented things we use all the time (Google Search) but just don't know it. Fascinating to think.

I'm not an expert, but I imagine these AIs attack the game using methods that just don't work with humans - predicting long deep branches of the game that are impossible to keep in your (well, at least my) head.

The way I recall building simple game AIs is to create a board evaluator, then build a game tree, prune as necessary, and min-max as system constraints allow. I'm sure "real" AIs are much more sophisticated but I don't know how much of what it does can be taught to a human.

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#148
post #7

One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My first guess when I saw Master's games was that it was a program like AlphaGo that had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imita…

Professional go player Otake Hideo supposedly said he would ask for three stones if playing against God. That was before AlphaGo.

My guess has always been that the real gap is much higher, and a perfect player could give 6 or even 9 stones to the world's top players.

In perfect play there would be no such thing as joseki. I don't think it would be a game we would even recognize.

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. I think it basically proves that any rule structured game without randomness is solvable.

Games like go and chess are necessarily solveable by definition, right? If you mean solveable in our lifetimes, by current technology, that's something else entirely, and much less likely. Beating human players in go is like finding a good heuristic for an NP-complete problem. Solving 19*19 go is like proving P!=NP, i.e. we don't even have tools that can approach the problem.

Not sure if this is true for Go. I'm not sure, but it seems to me that at some point a problem becomes "too complex" to solve. I.e. Go has about 2.08168199382×10^170 legal positions [1] and the number of atoms in the observable universe is only up to ~4×10^81.

I don't know if there are some theorems, thoughts, philosophies about whether this means it can't be solved, but at least it must be extremely difficult.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics#Legal_posit...

Re: Google reveals secret test of AI bot to beat top Go players

#150
post #145
post #7

One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My first guess when I saw Master's games was that it was a program like AlphaGo that had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imita…

> had its policy network trained from scratch rather than being bootstrapped by being given the goal of imitating the moves of strong humans I just watched a couple of games, and I can't agree. Master's fuseki looks a lot like human fuseki. It plays some original, unusual, confusing, non-human looking moves, yes. It also plays some moves at what would normally be considered the "wrong time" conventionally. But the fu…

Maybe it does not use the same opening style when it plays against a version of itself.

It would be very interesting to have pro-players comment on published records of alphago self-play.

Maybe alphago has discovered a new balance between black and white (that is a new optimal value of the komi) but when playing with the human defined of the value of the komi its optimal style is also different than what it would be otherwise.

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