Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players • Hacker News Board

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#231

Post by sukilot » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:48 PM UTC

AllanHoustonSt wrote: post #196

jimbokun wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones. We all use our cyborg-capabilities to search the internet and fact-check ourselves every day. Programmers use stack-overflow to teach themselves programming and remember obscure details (using our cyborg capabilities to tag, search, and sift through information ever faster and faster). Sure and any of us could jump on a motorcycle and f…

> Won't the winner be the one who just takes AlphaGo's recommended move every time without changing anything? That's only true if AlphaGo never makes a mistake or if AlphaGo will 100% always make the better or equal decision than a human + computer at any given state of the board. I know the former certainly isn't true and I assume the latter isn't true either, but I don't know enough about Go to say for sure.

Like self-driving cars, it's not enough to outsmart AI on one move, it's necessary to outsmart on AI with positive expected value over all the moves you are confident enough to weight in on.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#232

Post by otabdeveloper2 » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:50 PM UTC

lucidrains wrote: post #115

mourner wrote: post #6

> Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated Hard for me to empathize with this argument for his retirement. If we can't outrun a car, does that make running competitions pointless? The existence of AlphaGo doesn't diminish the triumph of being a number one human player in any way.

On the other hand, it must be sobering to realize that even with an entire lifetime of practice, you will never be better than a simple residual network trained for less than a week.

Is it sobering to realize that you will never multiply 12-digit numbers as well as a $0.99 calculator?

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#233

Post by dragontamer » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #230

dragontamer wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Won't the winner be the one who just takes AlphaGo's recommended move every time without changing anything? No. Consider this scheme. I take my copy of AlphaGo and for a full year, I'll build a database of all opening positions AlphaGo is willing to explore. I'll rank these opening positions from "best" (Black-wins with most consistency) to "worst" (White-wins with most consistency). I'll put all of this informatio…

This comment sounds reasonable, but shows that you don't understand the challenge of Go on computers very well. Go does not have openings. It has reasonable choices to make, with an insane branching factor, with few moves making much of a difference by themselves. Therefore your database will only extend a few moves, and all of the positions that it winds up with will still be very close to even. So your database con…

> Go does not have openings.

There are 381 opening moves in Go, but really only 96 because of symmetry. 96 (opening moves) x 380 responses x 379 x 378 x 377 == ~2 Trillion positions after 5 ply.

These 2-trillion positions will easily fit in a 16TB hard drive for $400. That's 8-bytes per position, so you probably can get there with more symmetries and some compression applied.

----------

You're thinking too much like a human. There's no Go-openings in the age of Human-Go. But in the age of Cyborg-Go where 16TB hard drives are allowed, we can begin to exhaustively build openings.

We even have a super-human AI that can automatically, and algorithmically, explore this opening book. We can build AWS-instances with V100 Tensor cores to use neural-nets to explore all of these positions now.

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> If you have alpha-go play itself a thousand times, it is unlikely that by move 10 you will wind up with the same board position twice.

Alpha-Go doesn't seem to implement much randomness at all into the moves it plays. The source of randomness is in time-controls (AlphaGo may choose MoveX before 30 seconds of analysis, or MoveY after 30 seconds of analysis), but this is a fairly constrained number of moves.

Play alphaGo by itself a thousand times, at precisely the same time MCTS-controls (say: 1-million nodes visited in the MCTS tree), and it will probably play the same game 1000 times in a row.

This makes AlphaGo extremely prone to opening database "attacks". Which is why I am using opening books as an easy example for how to beat a particular AlphaGo network. At least, until AlphaGo updates its algorithm for more random play.

If the goal is "Beat AlphaGo" in a game, then the opening book construction is far, far simpler. Even with random elements (ex: AlphaGo picks randomly from the top 10 best positions it generates), that is far more constrained than a full 381 x 380 x 379 x ... style opening book.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#234

Post by rpearl » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #35

While I can understand Lee Se-dol's frustration, I think there are better lessons to learn from Kasparov's acceptance after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov matches. Cyborg chess is the future of chess. Period. Chess players use computers to train themselves and explore openings in human-only settings, while programmers / cyborgs play correspondence chess. Go is not finished as a game. A new tool, MCTS + Neural nets, has be…

> Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones.

We've been cyborgs much longer than that! Writing is a very old auxiliary memory mechanism.

See also: Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang - http://archive.is/oYo0l

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#235

Post by red75prime » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:51 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #195

red75prime wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and probably never will Do you mean that human intelligence is not general enough to recreate functions of existing physical structure that implements general intelligence?

I'm just not convinced humans are just biological computers and nothing more. The fact that we experience qualia and seemingly have free will leads me to believe there is some extra "special sauce" that makes it impossible for a classical computer to replicate. Maybe someday it will be possible if we can solve the hard problem of consciousness in conjunction with quantum computing, etc.

> the hard problem of consciousness

does not involve any observable consequences. It can be completely ignored, if we don't go for mind uploading.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#236

Post by sukilot » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #169

Isn't saying AI is the future of Go like saying cars are the future of sprinting? I mean who cares if machines are faster/better/smarter than us at any particular task? That is true in millions of ways where humans still enjoy competing against each other. Maybe what's needed is just a perspective change where we stop thinking of Go as being against any other agent and make it, like every other human competition, aga…

Sprinting is a weird sport. I think it exists because running is a natural human skill that many people care about beyond running contests, because they can't thrive with complete dependence on machines for locomotion. In most people's lives, there are times where the ability to run actually matters.

But the ability to play Go never matters outside of playing Go, and we know who is the best at playing Go.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#237

Post by btilly » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #35

While I can understand Lee Se-dol's frustration, I think there are better lessons to learn from Kasparov's acceptance after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov matches. Cyborg chess is the future of chess. Period. Chess players use computers to train themselves and explore openings in human-only settings, while programmers / cyborgs play correspondence chess. Go is not finished as a game. A new tool, MCTS + Neural nets, has be…

Chess is a very different story than Go.

When computers became able to beat humans, the tradeoff was that computers were better tactically and humans better positionally. Therefore a human computer pair with the ultimate decision up to the human is able to be a better combination of positional and tactical than either alone. This is why Cyborg chess works so well.

But in Go, AlphaGo is simply better at everything. It is better both positionally and tactically. It can't always explain why the move is right, but adding human intuition on top of the computer only detracts from the quality of play.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#238

Post by the_af » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

Maybe relevant, from TFA:

> "Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA [Korean Baduk* Association] over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee."

*Baduk is the Korean name for Go.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#239

Post by smattiso » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

clmul wrote: post #109

smattiso wrote: post #55

Are we losing something as humans by automating so much? I mean I'm all for technical progress but at some point our computers will have killed so much of what makes us humans. Chess, go, driving, flying, math, written language, music... when does it stop? The standard answer is that we will automate all the dull parts of living and allow everybody to work in some sort of higher order capacity. That sounds great and…

I think the answer is quite simple, computers don't "kill" anything by themselves, for any new technological invention like AI you have a choice about whether you like it or not. What I'm saying with that is, that given the negative sentiment so many people have towards AI, I find it very unlikely that most of us will suddenly stop doing things just because some AI can do it better (look at chess). If AI's make music…

Sure I'm all for automating things we don't like doing, but everytime we outsource some piece of ourselves to technology we lose something in the process.

We invented farming and lost our communal hunter gathering cultures. We invented mass production and supply-chains for our food and lost our farming culture (for the most part). This isn't necessarily good or bad, but we are definitely losing something every time we invent something to make our lives easier. At some point there will be a tipping point of diminishing returns.

Personally I believe "the singularity" would be the worst possible thing to ever happen to humans. Sure we can visit distant parts of the universe and live forever but only as passengers to some AI. Would you rather be a dog in today's world or a human 1000 years ago?

Progress is unrelenting though and I certainly enjoy not having to wash my clothes by hand.

Re: Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players

#240

Post by usefulcat » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #229

jimbokun wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones. We all use our cyborg-capabilities to search the internet and fact-check ourselves every day. Programmers use stack-overflow to teach themselves programming and remember obscure details (using our cyborg capabilities to tag, search, and sift through information ever faster and faster). Sure and any of us could jump on a motorcycle and f…

I'm actually not sure if we have motorcycles that can accelerate faster than usain bolt. I know the blue fin tuna has more acceleration than any vehicle ever devised by humankind.

Maybe not over a distance of less than 1m, but over 100m?