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8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

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Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#31

Post by reaperman »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #25
bevekspldnw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Driving” is solved. Driving with humans on the road - doing unpredictable human things - is far off still. My guess is industrial and home robotics will solve a lot of the “doing things around humans” problems in the next ten years. Why the hell people decided to automate giant death machines before perfecting small things never made sense to me.

Fwiw, I work in home robotics, but have no experience in self driving. My halfway-naive belief is that self-driving is easier than getting useful home robots —in fact I feel it’s not even a close comparison. Some reasons: - The home is a very unstructured environment, whereas roads have at least _some structure_, and perhaps ~70% of the most useful roads even have clear lane markings and other signs. - People already…

> Customers are less likely to pay that for a robot that does your chores

They will if you can get them 2% financing like I can get on a new Honda HR-V.

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#33

Post by tromp »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #21
tromp wrote: post #5

> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations. The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to…

All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go. Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess. For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.

Or one could say that Go is about as complex as 4 simultaneous games of go, with the number of positions being about the 4th power.

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#34

Post by Veserv »

nemothekid wrote: post #26
lawn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. I think the interesting thing is how an expert in a field is wholly unprepared for predicting how the future will develop. You mention what Musk has said about FSD and how it will completely take over in just ten years, but I feel compelled to point out that Musk has said that it's just right around the corner with only small challe…

Musk wasn't wrong - he just wasn't the person to deliver it. Waymo, AFAICT works astonishingly in San Francisco. I think you can argue that it might not work in the snow, but that's pretty much it

Musk was wrong. He said specifically and unequivocally that Tesla would be delivering fully autonomous vehicles to customers within a year, every year for the last 8 years.

Just to get ahead of anybody claiming it was not a firm promise, in 2019: “ I think we will be feature-complete full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention — this year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark." [1]

See that part where he says: “I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a question mark.” That is called a firm promise.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doubles-down-on-cl...

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#35

Post by kibwen »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #21
tromp wrote: post #5

> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations. The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to…

All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go. Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess. For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.

> All these digits are only making it more obfuscated.

I think that using these numbers as as stand-ins for difficulty is itself a form of obfuscation.

The truth is that, despite the massive number of potential board states, Chess and Go are some of the easier games to solve, thanks to their nature (perfect information, zero randomness, alternating turns where each player plays exactly one move). And trying to use board states as a proxy for complexity and complexity as a proxy for difficulty doesn't generalize to other categories of games. Compared to Go, what's the complexity of Sid Meier's Civilization? If I devise a game of Candyland with 10^180 squares, is that harder to devise an optimal strategy for than Go just because it has more board states?

The reason that we're still using board states as a proxy for difficulty is because historically our metric of "this is difficult for a computer to play" was based on the size of the decision tree and thus the feasibility of locally searching it up to a given depth. In the age of machine learning, surely we can come up with a more interesting metric?

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#36

Post by lawn »

nemothekid wrote: post #26
lawn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. I think the interesting thing is how an expert in a field is wholly unprepared for predicting how the future will develop. You mention what Musk has said about FSD and how it will completely take over in just ten years, but I feel compelled to point out that Musk has said that it's just right around the corner with only small challe…

Musk wasn't wrong - he just wasn't the person to deliver it. Waymo, AFAICT works astonishingly in San Francisco. I think you can argue that it might not work in the snow, but that's pretty much it

If Musk was right we would've been there almost a decade ago.

And we're still not really there yet. They work great during some conditions and in certain areas, but they're still nowhere close to making human drivers obsolete.

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#37

Post by bnprks »

To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in my mind.

I haven't played Go in a while, but I'm kind of excited to try going back to use the KataGo-based analysis/training tools that exist now.

[1]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#38

Post by jfengel »

ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #4

I thought it would be an easy victory I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore. I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions today. For example with self-driving. Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much interested in talks about lic…

At the time, I think everybody was unaware of this. Everybody followed the development of machine chess, but it was widely assumed that machine go was an entirely different category of difficulty. Chess engines gradually encroached on the very top grandmasters. AlphaGo came out of nowhere.

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#39

Post by banannaise »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #21
tromp wrote: post #5

> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations. The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to…

All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go. Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess. For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.

Number of possible game states is a poor measure of complexity. How many game states does soccer or basketball have, when you consider flight of ball and movement of players? Does that tell us anything about whether basketball is more complex than Go?

Re: 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

#40

Post by radarsat1 »

vintermann wrote: post #19
bongodongobob wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize this was 8 years ago, and no Go engine came even close to what Alpha Go was able to do right? Afaik, there weren't even any competitive engines period. It basically came out of nowhere.

Not entirely right. Remi Coulom's Monte Carlo Tree Search, in 2006, was the first really big discovery. It didn't make engines good enough to beat the best humans, but it steadily made them good enough to beat 99% of go playing humans, playing at up to 6 - 7 dan level. It was still part of AlphaGo, too (though as I recall AlphaGo Zero did away with it).

I think AlphaZero does use MCTS?
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