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AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

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Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#291

Post by 1024core »

fhe wrote: post #239

As someone who studied AI in college and am a reasonably good amateur player, I have been following the matches between Lee and AlphaGo. AlphaGo plays some unusual moves that go clearly against any classically trained Go players. Moves that simply don't quite fit into the current theories of Go playing, and the world's top players are struggling to explain what's the purpose/strategy behind them. I've been giving it…

The analogy I can come up with, based on your post, is of something like addition. We don't know how we add numbers in our heads; but we somehow do it. Some people can do it very, very quickly[1], but won't be able to explain how they did it. On the other hand: a computer doesn't look at digits and numbers; it just looks at bits and shifts them around as appropriate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakuntala_Devi

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#292

Post by 1024core »

ig1 wrote: post #254
fhe wrote: post #239

As someone who studied AI in college and am a reasonably good amateur player, I have been following the matches between Lee and AlphaGo. AlphaGo plays some unusual moves that go clearly against any classically trained Go players. Moves that simply don't quite fit into the current theories of Go playing, and the world's top players are struggling to explain what's the purpose/strategy behind them. I've been giving it…

AlphaGo is essentially built on the work that IBM did on TD-Gammon (a reinforcement learning backgammon player) in the 90s. Pretty much the same thing happened with TD-Gammon with it playing unconventional moves, in the longer term humans ended up adopting some of TD-Gammon's tactics once they understood how they played out, it wouldn't be surprising to see the same happen with Go.

> AlphaGo is essentially built on the work that IBM did on TD-Gammon (a reinforcement learning backgammon player) in the 90s.

Citation needed.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#293

Post by ghaff »

daveguy wrote: post #231
crispyambulance wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose in the era of Bobby Fischer, chess was proxy for superpower one-upmanship. That's long gone, but Chess as a game is still doing fine and I expect that it will be the same for Go. We still have chess tournaments, super-star grandmasters and circus freaks (people who can play blindfolded against multiple opponents). And, yes, computers can easily smoke all but elite players. Why should Go be different?

And, yes, computers can easily smoke all players. FTFY In chess the top engines are rated hundreds of ELO points above Magnus Carlsen (top human). No top ranked human vs computer match has been publicised in over 5 years because humans are thoroughly trounced. There are cyborg matches which are interesting. Human + Computer vs Human + Computer because gameplay techniques are considered different. Humans still depend…

I guess it's because Go isn't that well known in the West but I find it a bit surprising (though not really) that this isn't getting more press. When Kasparov lost it was news but not really surprising. If it wasn't Kasparov that a computer beat, it would have been the next champion. The writing was on the wall for a long time. It was just a question of when exactly.

As for Go, I guess I would never had made a long bet against computers. But as recently as just over a decade ago, computers lost to merely competent players and people working on Go programs were pretty much saying that they didn't even know what the path forward looked like. Things improved a lot with Monte Carlo but even that stalled out. Admittedly, I don't follow this area closely, but these wins pretty much came out of nowhere.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#294

Post by teekert »

fhe wrote: post #239

As someone who studied AI in college and am a reasonably good amateur player, I have been following the matches between Lee and AlphaGo. AlphaGo plays some unusual moves that go clearly against any classically trained Go players. Moves that simply don't quite fit into the current theories of Go playing, and the world's top players are struggling to explain what's the purpose/strategy behind them. I've been giving it…

I like your statement: "It's both exciting and eerie. It's like another intelligent species opening up a new way of looking at the world (at least for this very specific domain). and much to our surprise, it's a new way that's more powerful than ours."

I think this will the theme of our future interactions with AIs. We simply can't imagine in advance how they will see and interact with the world. There will be many surprises.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#295

Post by aaimnr »

typon wrote: post #280

I've had this thought watching this play out over the past few months. You have this deeply mystical, zen-like game of ancient China which represents the philosophy of the East and it's pitted against this pure capitalist, cold and calculating (literally) machine. You can hold out for a few thousand years, but eventually the uncontrollable and amoral technological imperative will catch on and crush you. It's kind of…

On the other hand one could say that it's a pretty shallow understanding of Zen, given that Buddhism assumes that everything in the mind - being a part of nature - is fully conditioned (deterministic), as opposed to Christian view of a human as a holy, God-like creature, distinctly different than the rest of nature.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#297

Post by w0bb13 »

blacktulip wrote: post #282

Does anyone notice the lack of ko[1] in the games? In all 7 public games (5 with Fan and 2 with Lee) there isn't any ko. This is unusual. If we still can't see ko fights in the following 3 games...I would suspect that AlphaGo isn't able to handle ko well enough yet, and Google asked Lee and Fan to not initialize ko fights in the games. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko_fight

I can't believe they would be told not to, or that Lee would abide by it in this match!

Now, I'm not good enough to evaluate if this seems likely, but I could understand that AlphaGo (especially if it was winning) avoided Kos, since they are high variance situations.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#298

Post by Cpoll »

gsklee wrote: post #156
Cookingboy wrote: post #116

Someone somewhere asked why a lot of people in the Go community is taking this in a somewhat hard way, here is my hypothesis: Go, unlike Chess, has deep mytho attached to it. Throughout the history of many Asian countries it's seen as the ultimate abstract strategy game that deeply relies on players' intuition, personality, worldview. The best players are not described as "smart", they are described as "wise". I thin…

On a more realistic side note... Professional Go players devote decades in training ever since their youth, giving up normal educations and lots of other more lucrative opportunities for their lives. It's very easy to imagine their frustrations now that their life-time devotion actually means nothing in front of the AI. It's an upright denial to the way of life they so chose and devoted. IMHO Google should donate the…

I wouldn't worry about a quick shift like that. You can look to the Chess world, there are still plenty of masters and grandmasters earning their bread. There's still lots of interest in the human vs. human aspect of the game. In lectures, some GMs make good use of those widely available AIs for analysis, too.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#299

Post by settings »

saalweachter wrote: post #286
cubano wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be. I think that would be pretty awesome and amazing, to be honest.

I think it'd be terrifying. Imagine the best book you've ever read. Entrancing, enlightening, cathartic. You reach the end, and it's ... perfect. Oh hey, a sequel. Wow, the sequel is just as good as the first book. It expands upon it without diminishing the original -- you feel better, more complete for having read it. Wait, is that a third book in the series? Wow, it's even better than the first two! A fourth -- wel…

This is only a bad thing if you feel compelled or addicted to reading these books. There is nothing wrong with always having a better book ready until you obsess about it.

Re: AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5

#300

Post by w0bb13 »

conanbatt wrote: post #275
taneq wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you can term them as "clear mistakes" when the game is playing at a higher level than any of us meatbags. In this case (according to DeepMind) it's no different to a racing driver backing off the pace in the last few laps if they have a big lead - it's better to guarantee a win than to win by a large margin.

You might be confusing correctness with relevance. You can pass at the last move and lose 1 point, but if your lead is 5, its the same win-result but not the same count-result. Well, that would be a mistake by all accounts, even if AlphaGo made it. Some of the moves AlphaGo played both in this game and the previous one are very definite mistakes, but they were irrelevant to the difference in the game.

Alphago isn't programmed to think of that as a mistake (i.e. the team wouldn't be disappointed if she did it). It really only cares about W/L.
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