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

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

#381
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to add that opening books are not THAT effective in computer chess either. Yes, they are significantly more effective than in computer go (because of the smaller branching factor and greater role of tactics). However, exponential increase in game tree size is crazy, even in chess. Thus, opening books really can't take you THAT far into a chess game (10 moves). An engine with a worse book but better search/eval…

The main purpose of opening books is to beat any player who is strictly relying upon Stockfish (or LeelaZero's) output to play the game. Because these engines play very deterministically, you can beat people who just play's Stockfish #1 (or LeelaZero #1) move over and over.

I think the main issue with your initial statement was that you said you could beat someone just taking AlphaGo's advice on every move. Usually when people talk about opening books, they think of the opening book as being part of the engine's decision making process, not an addition to it. Usually this is literally the case, as in chess where I can add an opening book to Stockfish's runtime options.

In my opinion, it's really strange to describe this as an expert "beating" AlphaGo, when really it's just a technique for making AlphaGo stronger than it is without a huge pre-calculated cache of moves.

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AlphaGo can play go but it cannot appreciate the beauty of the game On the contrary, appreciating the game is the core of what AlphaGo does. In order to search the tree of moves it learns how to play (expand search) and how to evaluate (cut off branches of search). I believe it might appreciate the game on a deeper level than humans, in its own unique way. Of course it can't appreciate the social aspect of the game…

AlphaGo doesn't appreciate the game at all. It is just trying to survive in a hostile environment. You might as well say that your gut bacteria appreciate the food at your favorite restaurant better than you do. Put another way, Chess is literally a matter of life and death for AlphaGo, because chess is all it knows. It has no exterior context for which chess is a metaphor.

And it doesn't even know the name of the game it is playing.

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

#383

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.

> 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.

Even if AlphaGo makes mistakes, and somewhere on the board a better move can be found, you would also need the human to reliably spot it.

Eg: AlphaGo makes a move. Let's say that at least 20% of AlphaGo moves can be bettered. Is this one of them? How can you tell? Most of the time, you'll mistakenly think a move can be improved and end up playing a worse one.

But, let's make AlphaGo even more fallible. Let's say that at least 50% of AlphaGo moves can be bettered. Again, is this one of those? How can you tell? And more to the point, on the times you are wrong, are you more wrong than AlphaGo is with its mistakes? Because even if you imagine you can spot a better move than AlphaGo and pick the actual better move 50% of the time, you also need your mistaken moves to be better than AlphaGo's mistaken moves or you'll still lose.

Worst of all, you can rule out a really good ability to spot AlphaGo's mistakes already. Let's say 99% of AlphaGo's moves have a better option. If you could spot them all, you'd be beating AlphaGo regularly on your own. As no human can now beat AlphaGo, this plainly isn't true.

So it's likely that:

a) No human can reliably pick a better move than AlphaGo and/or b) No human can reliably spot a move from AlphaGo can be improved, and/or c) Human mistakes are worse than AlphaGo mistakes, so even if you could fight it up to parity you'd still lose.

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this has nothing to do with cyborg chess. From my perspective, cyborg chess is about playing the best game of chess in all time... only stopping once we have discovered "the perfect game" (aka: proving that White-wins, Black-wins, or a Draw is always possible with perfect play) The computers currently playing Chess, and Go, are incredibly powerful. But they are far from perfect. People have constantly found weaknes…

Solving Go is an interesting theoretical pastime, but there is no reason to expect any particular overlap between people who are interested in playing the game (like Lee Sedol) and people who are interested in building machines to asymptotically approach a solution beyond human understanding. Most of the resistance you're getting in this thread seems to be due to the fact that you think people who are interested in t…

Claiming that the era of human Go is over seems melodramatic. Computers were better than the best humans at chess decades ago and professional (human) chess is still big, with schools, tournaments, prize money, superstars (Magnus Carlsen is a pretty big deal) etc.

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

#385

I think this is a strange reason to retire and as the article points out it might also simply be due to the legal conflict he is currently in with the KBA. Chess engines have been defeating humans for 20+ years (and are overwhelmingly stronger for a long time), but that hasn't diminished the interest in competitive chess, because the human element of competition and struggle and deep fundamental appreciation for the…

> AlphaGo can play go but it cannot appreciate the beauty of the game On the contrary, appreciating the game is the core of what AlphaGo does. In order to search the tree of moves it learns how to play (expand search) and how to evaluate (cut off branches of search). I believe it might appreciate the game on a deeper level than humans, in its own unique way. Of course it can't appreciate the social aspect of the game…

Cute, but blatantly incorrect.

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

#386
post #68

Full disclosure, I've never played go in real life. In fact only a handful of times on the family computer back in the early 90's (i486). Back then I had 0 understanding about the complexity of the game but now I can appreciate it. Now, going away from this and into the following statement: > said his retirement was primarily motivated by the invincibility of AI Go programs I have a slight problem with that line of t…

I feel like “still basically curve fitting” may be underselling emotion-wise how powerful “curve fitting” is.

Is there any computational task which couldn’t be done through something which could be called “curve fitting”?

“Curve fitting” just means “approximating a function”, yeah? And what is a computational task other than computing a function, or some generalization of functions (e.g. could involve randomness or interactivity or the like as well)

Now, yes, current AI doesn’t yet have a model of the world including it being embedded in the world, and such that it chooses actions in order to further goals.

But, I don’t see why such a thing fundamentally couldn’t be accomplished using what one might call “curve fitting”.

If Strong AI could potentially be accomplished using “curve fitting”, I’m not sure that it makes sense to say things like “merely curve fitting”.

Though, you didn’t say “just” or “merely”.

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

#387

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 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?

Based on what we've seen in a couple decades of computer-aided chess, no. A good chess player using a top-rated engine to help them can pretty consistently beat the engine by itself.

There are tournaments and even a world championship in computer-aided (correspondence) chess and you don't come close to winning by just taking the program's recommended move every time.

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

#388
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best musicians, actors, and artists are extremely well compensated What is your definition of best in this context? As far as I know, taste in art is very personal... Artists I consider the best are often very far from well compensated.

In that context, it would probably have to be those with widest appeal, which comes with it's own criticisms. But, in almost any particular human artistic sub-niche with it's own definition of "best", the same principle will hold, with compensation and skill level being well correlated. It's also typically not even close to linearly correlated either, most of the compensation lies at the far tail of "best".

I guess I see a great artist as somebody like Su Hui, who made Star Gauge without any thought, or even likelihood of compensation, or recognition.

It's nice to be paid, and it's nice to be recognized, but I think art has its own form of wealth - otherwise, why make art? Why not just seek recognition, or money?

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

#389

I sympathize. It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ... But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perfor…

And this will happen to all of humanness in time. Everything we think is unique about us, and our endeavours, will be reduced to optimization and learning algorithms eventually.

The main issue in determining man or machine in each situation eventually will be which has the lower TOC.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AlphaGo can play go but it cannot appreciate the beauty of the game On the contrary, appreciating the game is the core of what AlphaGo does. In order to search the tree of moves it learns how to play (expand search) and how to evaluate (cut off branches of search). I believe it might appreciate the game on a deeper level than humans, in its own unique way. Of course it can't appreciate the social aspect of the game…

AlphaGo doesn't appreciate the game at all. It is just trying to survive in a hostile environment. You might as well say that your gut bacteria appreciate the food at your favorite restaurant better than you do. Put another way, Chess is literally a matter of life and death for AlphaGo, because chess is all it knows. It has no exterior context for which chess is a metaphor.

> AlphaGo doesn't appreciate the game at all.

It's 'appreciating' the value of various states and moves, in light of a vast trove of experience.

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