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

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411–420 of 554 posts

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

#411

I've spent so many years playing and hearing about how Go will not be solved in our lifetime that the day AlphaGo won 4/5 games v Lee Sedol marked my personal timeline into what came before and after. I walked around all day in a daze watching people as they go about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. I've heard it said that man landing on the moon was like that for them, but I didn't understand as it was…

I have an opposite view: it's not that shocking that AI has advanced a lot. It's a lot more shocking to learn that humans aren't as great as we hope to be. Also, our prediction sucks. I mean, who said that go is such a difficult problem that it would take a lifetime to solve? Sounds like intellectual arrogance to me. Sure, the problem space is huge, but it's well-defined and homogeneous. There was a time that reciting a long text or multiplying large numbers is considered a humanly intelligent thing, only that it wasn't. Alan Turing used to think that AI is good to humans because it teaches us to be humble, and I think we're kind of getting there (for certain domains). On the other hand, things like self-driving will remain unsolvable because the problem is fundamentally ill-defined; we don't even know what is a good driving.

(Edit) To those who think self-driving is a well-defined problem: it can be in some remote areas, but imagine driving in bustling city streets with kids, bicycles and dogs. The driving problem becomes a communication problem.

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

#412

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…

> perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ...

But, while you sit there waxing creative, your brain cells are likewise performing a mindless task on an enormous scale.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the performance vs understanding dialectic. A bunch of humans built a machine that is superior at chess, but that machine can't teach humans what it knows.

Humans can and are absorbing some of what the machine has demonstrated. I think Kasparov has it right when he says that the best player isn't a human or a machine, but a human using a machine as a tool. The machine can help the player optimize and reduce mistakes, but machines don't yet know how to ask questions and explore in the same way. Maybe they never will.

There's a name for this approach, they call human-AI teams "centaurs". It's a fascinating concept. I am deeply curious if eventually that will be outstripped by pure AI too. I believe so.

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

#414

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…

[deleted]

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

#415

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…

> 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 Is that true? I feel like chess was a bigger deal in the past. Among my peers, poker and computer games seem a lot more popular.

Well, I was never a grandmaster, but my amateur interest in Chess was killed completely after I realized it was impossible to beat computers. Then I switched to Go... and now I don't have a game to play anymore.

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

#416

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…

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpN3-2FP-kIxXhhdDds9...

That's a playlist of 31 self-play games analyzed by Michael Redmond 9p. They are plenty interesting to study.

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

#417

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.

That depends on whether "Everything" is finite or infinite.

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

#418

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…

> the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go

There is art! It's just an emergent property of learning the game. Seeking art doesn't make you a better player - that's the trap one can easily fall in any sports. It's the opposite - efficient strategies solidify as art.

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

#419
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not anything for grandchildren. Right here, today, someone tried to draw some moral parallel between racism and someone else's views on the possible limitations of AI. That is totally effed up. It's totally effed up whether or not the original thing about AI is right or wrong.

Why is it wrong to draw that parallel?

[deleted]

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

#420

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…

> 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 Is that true? I feel like chess was a bigger deal in the past. Among my peers, poker and computer games seem a lot more popular.

The global population increased, and more people took up Chess, but they're further distributed, so locally it seems like it has cooled when globally it's more popular than ever.
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