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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

#481

Post by Iv »

braythwayt wrote: post #460
breatheoften wrote: post #374

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…

> 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 ... All but the last phrase are still true. Pursuit of Go for beauty is still pursuit of Go for beauty. I will never play any instrument as well as a sequencer. I believe algorithms will make beautiful Jazz improvisations in…

In case you are other readers are interested, what you describe is an old philosophical debate spanning mostly morals but as you point out, also the pursuit of happiness and other areas. It is the opposition between consequentialism (=what is important is the result of your actions) versus deontologism (=what is important is what you are doing, not the result).

I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it is good that we dive a bit more in our philosophical world and reach for what makes us human.

It took me a long time to understand that if you remove the pure rational intellect, something precious still remains: the driving force that shapes our morals. There is not rational reason to like survival. To love our children, to do what we call good. The resons for that are moral and are, I believe, what defines us as human at the core.

Ian Banks was spot on in calling a future civilization a "Culture". Because when machines take over the productive work, defining our values is going to be our full time activity. Machines may participate, but why would they add anything we consider valuable to the core?

That's going to be an interesting transition and I am happy that I'll probably live to see it!

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

#482

Post by bordercases »

braythwayt wrote: post #460
breatheoften wrote: post #374

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…

> 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 ... All but the last phrase are still true. Pursuit of Go for beauty is still pursuit of Go for beauty. I will never play any instrument as well as a sequencer. I believe algorithms will make beautiful Jazz improvisations in…

People need to experience a sense of competency and power as a part of feeling satisfaction with their lives. It is not the only route to satisfaction, but in my opinion it's one of the few roads to great satisfaction.

I agree with the sentiment that one can't be good at everything, and that there is a radically high-performance exemplar for anything, but for machines to dominate in almost every category of luxury endeavour -- yes I can see that as demoralizing. Even the useless things we spend our time on, we can be no good at that.

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

#483

Post by allovernow »

Iv wrote: post #481
braythwayt wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ... All but the last phrase are still true. Pursuit of Go for beauty is still pursuit of Go for beauty. I will never play any instrument as well as a sequencer. I believe algorithms will make beautiful Jazz improvisations in…

In case you are other readers are interested, what you describe is an old philosophical debate spanning mostly morals but as you point out, also the pursuit of happiness and other areas. It is the opposition between consequentialism (=what is important is the result of your actions) versus deontologism (=what is important is what you are doing, not the result). I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it…

>I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it is good that we dive a bit more in our philosophical world and reach for what makes us human.

That's a recurring theme in Ghost in the Shell, at least the anime series. That as the line between human and machine is blurred, the general trend is in the direction of homogeneity, but here and there you still see people doing "deontological" things, ostensibly as a grasp at uniqueness to preserve self.

An interesting thought occurs to me though, with the proliferation of various NN architectures, and the idea that such nets, if scaled and installed to power humanoid robots, would effectively learn different heuristics after training on chaotically different data, it's quite possible that machines will also gradually evolve individuality and something rather close to personality.

Perhaps individuality is an intrinsic, emergent property in any system of generally intelligent and learning agents. Like a 3+ body on steroids, millions, if not billions of dimensions.

Also interesting to consider that the emergence of uniqueness among a system of said agents seems to increase entropy, a presently unique to life property given that everything inanimate in the universe does exactly the opposite. The more I think of general AI, the more I have trouble distinguishing it from the only other sentient intelligence we know of.

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

#484

Post by Randomini »

deathanatos wrote: post #429
euske wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recitin…

> 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. Humans arrive safe and unhurt (as much as possible, especially while human drivers remain on the road) at their destination with minimal violation of the locality's established rules of the road. No? (Though now that I've written what amounts to a utility fu…

Drivers (both AI and human) may face problems that are essentially ethical trolley problems. While many of these choices are clearly artificial to the point of ridiculousness, the one that gets me best is "should a self-driving car drive itself off a cliff, killing its only passenger, or hit and kill some >1 number of pedestrians?". While the external observation may be "minimising deaths is preferable, so drive off that cliff", are people willing to use a vehicle that might intentionally kill them as an intrinsic part of its operation? Or will market forces result in self-driving cars that make more selfish choices being more popular, potentially resulting in suboptimal prisoners-dilemma style results?

There are also different ethical norms in different cultures about preferences (https://www.wired.com/story/trolley-problem-teach-self-drivi...). While these are edge cases, they're the edge cases people are worried about, and the source of the ill-definedness: "unhurt as much as possible" implicitly chooses some ethical tradeoff that people can easily have different answers to.

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

#485

Post by 1123581321 »

13415 wrote: post #395
Symmetry wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is what "solved" means in deep learning. Common terms very often acquire different technical meanings in different fields. Or even technical terms! Whether a single hydrogen atom is a "molecule" depends on whether you're talking to a physicist or a chemist. And "functor" means something very different in Java programming patterns than it does in math.

I have to concur with the other poster here. You're not using the term in the usual way. Traditionally a game is called solved when its search space has been searched exhaustively or there is some other analytic solution that allows you to determine who wins and who looses in every constellation. Tic-tac-toe is solved, for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game

Regardless, we need a term for “computers can play the game at levels no human can beat.”

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

#486

Post by Noos »

Raidion wrote: post #441
fiatjaf wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems weird, I don't know you would want to link your enjoyment with a game to it's unsolvability. Like don't you enjoy a game to enjoy a game? You can't beat Carlsen either, but you enjoyed the game at your level. Now computers are Carlsen +1, but how you enjoy the game shouldn't be affected. Especially since deep blue won in '97 and the game is still very alive and well, it hasn't been killed by computers but…

effort has to be matched with reward, and chess takes a lot of effort to get good at beyond a certain level. It's actually a big issue with many things, the "middle" of artists, people who do sports, music, and more is hollowing out versus consumers and pros.

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

#487

Post by kerkeslager »

eyegor wrote: post #51

Am I the only one reading this article with the take away that the ai is not his primary reason for retirement? I understand that the title has its own conclusion but it seems overly sensational to me. > He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee. > "... [I] have something else to do," he said, asserting his only dream for now is to rest and spend time w…

I've heard many times that people come to Hacker News because the comments are better than the articles.

I have to say, I'm just continually puzzled by this. In this thread, yours is the only comment where it appears that the commenter read beyond the first few paragraphs. There are numerous comments by people speaking authoritatively on go and AlphaGo, who have clearly not studied either significantly.

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

#488

Post by niyaven »

baroffoos wrote: post #458
Barrin92 wrote: post #60

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…

A simple script could win at FPS games every single time but it also hasn't diminished the value of the game as long as none of your competitors are using it.

This is very true, I never thought of it. Maybe the difference is that we always knew that AIs would easily win in FPS games. Whereas Go, Chess or Shougi were considered as a proof of human intelligence, for a very long time. Discovering, after all these years, our history, that a machine can now beat us at these games may be the major difference.

Maybe for these games to keep popularity, we just need to update our perception of it. The same way we do with FPS games. Yes, we know a bot would do better - but that's not what matters.

Another thing, as said in other comments, is that we can learn from bots. New strategies, new patterns. AFAIK, this is not happening in FPS eSports scene.

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

#489

Post by SubiculumCode »

55555 wrote: post #474
blondie9x wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that this AI agent was built to beat humans. Horses were not built to run faster than humans. You have to remember the specific comparison and the art that humans tried to partake in to master go. Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly. Cars and humans also do not compete at the 100 meter dash. If humans and robots compete at 100 meter dash than the olympics will sim…

> Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly I hate to be that guy, but: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon It is very silly indeed.

2004 2007 a human won. Wow.

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

#490

Post by sungchi »

breatheoften wrote: post #374

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…

> there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play

That's not true.

Q: How much better is AI now compared to when Lee was playing against AlphaGo?

"It has increased enormously. It is only natural for the pros to lose a couple of spots. That's why most of the pros study baduk with AI."

Korean News Interview: http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=2019...

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