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AI winter is well on its way

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Re: AI winter is well on its way

#501

Post by dragontamer »

orwin wrote: post #368
felippee wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like humanity really needs another chess playing program 20 years after IBM solved that problem (but now utilizing 1000x more compute power). I just find all these game playing contraptions really uninteresting. There are plenty real world problems to be solved of much higher practicality. Moravec's paradox in full glow.

The fact that it beat Stockfish9 is not what is impressive with AlphaZero. What was impressive was the way Stockfish9 was beaten. AlphaZero played like a human player, making sacrifices for position that stockfish thought were detrimental. When it played as white, the fact that is mostly started with the Queen pawn (despite that the King pawn is "best by test") and the way AlphaZero used Stockfish pawnstructure and t…

> What was impressive was the way Stockfish9 was beaten.

Without its opening database and without its endgame tablebase?

Frankly, the Stockfish vs AlphaZero match was the beginning of the AI Winter in my mind. The fact that they disabled Stockfish's primary databases was incredibly fishy IMO and is a major detriment to their paper.

Stockfish's engine is designed to only work in the midgame of Chess. Remove the opening database and remove the endgame database, and you're not really playing against Stockfish anymore.

The fact that Stockfish's opening was severely gimped is not a surprise to anybody in the Chess community. Stockfish didn't have its opening database enabled... for some reason.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#502

Post by bitL »

kamaal wrote: post #488
danmaz74 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, though, what will happen with the demise of Moore's law... can we simply go with increased parallelism? How much can that scale?

That part will be harder than we can imagine. Most of the software world will have to move on stuff like Haskell or functional language. As of now bulk(almost all) of our people are trained to program in C based languages. It won't be easy. There will be a renewal for high demand software jobs.

I don't think Haskell/FP is a solution either... Even if it allows some beautiful straightforward parallelization in Spark for typical cases, more advanced cases become convoluted, require explicit caching, and decrease performance significantly, unless some nasty hacks are involved (resembling cut operator in Prolog). I guess bleeding edge will be always difficult and one should not restrict their choices to a single paradigm.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#503

Post by bitL »

jacquesm wrote: post #500
bitL wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot fit a cluster of GPUs into a phone where I could make magic happen real-time though :(

Hm. Offload the job to a remote cluster? Or is comms then the limiting factor?

It won't give us that snappy feeling; imagine learning things in milliseconds and immediately displaying them on your phone.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#504

Post by Florin_Andrei »

bitL wrote: post #503
jacquesm wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. Offload the job to a remote cluster? Or is comms then the limiting factor?

It won't give us that snappy feeling; imagine learning things in milliseconds and immediately displaying them on your phone.

Jeez. That would be faster than protein-and-water-based systems, which up until now are still the faster learners.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#506

Post by pdimitar »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #267
sgt101 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shows something about the game, but it's clear that humans don't learn in the way that alpha zero does, do i don't think that alpha zero illuminated any aspect of human intelligence.

I think that fundamentally the goal of research is not necessarily human-like intelligence, just any high-level general intelligence. It's just that the human brain (and the rest of the body) has been a great example of an intelligent entity which we could source of a lot inspiration from. Whether the final result will share a the technical and structural similarity (and how much) to a human, the future will tell.

Not sure if I am reading you correctly but to me you basically are saying "we have no idea but we believe that one day it will make sense".

Sounds more like religion and less like science to me.

I guess we could argue until the end of the world that no intelligence will emerge from more and more clever ways of brute-forcing your way out of problems in a finite space with perfect information. But that's what I think.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#507

Post by pdimitar »

kamaal wrote: post #219
felippee wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like humanity really needs another chess playing program 20 years after IBM solved that problem (but now utilizing 1000x more compute power). I just find all these game playing contraptions really uninteresting. There are plenty real world problems to be solved of much higher practicality. Moravec's paradox in full glow.

>>20 years after IBM solved that problem We solved nothing. IBM Deep Blue doesn't exactly think like humans do. Most of our algorithms really are 'better brute force'. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man...

Exactly. To my not-very-well-informed self, even AlphaGo Zero is just a more clever way to brute-force board games.

Side observers are taking joy in the risker plays that it did -- reminded them of certain grand-masters I suppose -- but that still doesn't mean AGZ is close to any form of intelligence at all. Those "riskier moves" are probably just a way to more quickly reduce the problem space anyway.

It seriously reminds me more and more of religion, the AI area these days.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#508

Post by throwaway47861 »

tigershark wrote: post #279
majewsky wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a very confined area. He mentions similar issues with Tesla's coast-to-coast autopilot ride: The software is not general enough yet to handle it. That seems to be the case for Waymo as well.

And how is this a failure of AI? The most optimistic opinions on where we would see autonomous car were on the 2020s. Instead we have autonomous car hauling people on the streets without any safety driver since 2017. And if everything goes accordingly their plan they will launch a commercial service by the end of the year in several US cities. To me it seems a resounding success, not a failure.

> The most optimistic opinions on where we would see autonomous car were on the 2020s.

Sure, keep moving timelines. It's what makes you money in the area. I am sure when around mid-2019 hits, it will suddenly be "most experts agree that the first feasible self-driving cars will arrive circa 2025".

You guys are hilarious.

Re: AI winter is well on its way

#509

Post by agstewart »

adynatos wrote: post #486
tim333 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Deepmind hasn't shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero They went on to make AlphaZero, a generalised version that could learn chess, shogi or any similar game. The chess version beat a leading conventional chess program 28 wins, 0 losses, and 72 draws. That seemed impressive to me. Also they used loads of compute during the training but not so much during play.(5000 TPUs, 4TPUs). Also it got better th…

oh wow, it can play chess. can it efficiently stack shelves in warehouses yet?

"It" can reduce power consumption by 15%.

https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...

Just because alpha zero doesn't solve the problem you want it to doesn't mean that advancements aren't being made that matter to someone else. To ignore that seems disingenuous.

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