Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 114 posts

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#41

Post by eru »

mapt wrote: post #30

All AI does is remove the ability to progress through the ranks accurately via online play. Unregulated online competition will suddenly become a bumpy road full of Elo-breaking presences. I gather this may be a Big Deal, but except insofar as it kills the sport by a thousand cuts, 'Young Go Prodigies' have nothing to worry about.

The computer will be able to give you an Elo number just by looking at all the moves you did in a few games.

Since the computer can tell for every single move whether you played perfectly or if not, by how much you decreased your chances of winning against perfect competition, you'll be able to get a hundred signals out of a game into your elo calculation, instead of just one win/loss condition.

They already do that for catching cheaters in chess. In essence, you treat the positions that occur in a game not as a logical sequence, but as a series of multiple-choice questions.

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#42

Post by eru »

beatpanda wrote: post #35

Here's a related and possibly more interesting question nobody seems to be asking -- in the age of robotics and artificial intelligence, does exploitation of workers and environmental catastrophe at the point of extraction of the materials we use to build computers and robots have a future? And if the answer is yes, why isn't anyone trying to use robots for that purpose?

People are automating resource gathering all the time. See eg http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#43

Post by mapt »

eru wrote: post #41
mapt wrote: post #30

All AI does is remove the ability to progress through the ranks accurately via online play. Unregulated online competition will suddenly become a bumpy road full of Elo-breaking presences. I gather this may be a Big Deal, but except insofar as it kills the sport by a thousand cuts, 'Young Go Prodigies' have nothing to worry about.

The computer will be able to give you an Elo number just by looking at all the moves you did in a few games. Since the computer can tell for every single move whether you played perfectly or if not, by how much you decreased your chances of winning against perfect competition, you'll be able to get a hundred signals out of a game into your elo calculation, instead of just one win/loss condition. They already do that…

Color me skeptical. The value of things like Elo is they provide a ramping scale with some degree of statistical significance, because they cover play over many games. I don't think a computer is going to be able to extrapolate with a high degree of confidence, because human play is variable from game to game and long-run strategies are non-obvious constructs for the computer.

You're thinking in terms of 'The AI has solved Go mathematically', but that's not the case; Just because you can run a Monte Carlo best-choice-picker/guesser algorithm doesn't mean you can meaningfully rank how deliberate choices compare with each other more than a few plays away.

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#44

Post by melling »

chenglou wrote: post #5

I mean, that's like asking whether marathon runners have a future now that we've got cars. Exercising one's brain/having pleasure through the game could be an end in itself, and is independent of how machines perform.

Read the first paragraph. Sounds like the students in the story are forgoing most other learning to be great Go players. There's a big difference in their level of dedication. Does Go still remain as exciting of a sport?

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#45

Post by zouhair »

chenglou wrote: post #5

I mean, that's like asking whether marathon runners have a future now that we've got cars. Exercising one's brain/having pleasure through the game could be an end in itself, and is independent of how machines perform.

Man it would have been great to live at the time of horse races.

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#46

Post by mark_l_watson »

Good writing.

I also expect that more people will start playing Go, or like me, get a renewed interest in the game.

I read that Lee Sidol is planning on retiring from active play in a few years and move to the USA to evangelize the game in the West.

I played the South Korean national champion and the women's world champion in handicapped exhibition games in the 1970s. It would be awesome to get to do the same with Lee Sidol!

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#47

Post by afarrell »

nothis wrote: post #37
threatofrain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that marathon runners will no longer be in regular use in industry, and be relegated to special events justified in part by aesthetics, and also by audience spectacle? Likewise, if machines can do quality accounting, does that mean that accounts will be relegated to special accounting events, just like there are marathon events, where people come for aesthetic enjoyment or audience spectacle?

IMO the analogy is correct for Go players as that's mostly a "sport". There's real cases of similar technology putting people out of jobs, for example I recently read that more and more finance firms more or less completely automate a lot of processes, even those where you'd traditionally would have counted on people's "gut feelings". Deep learning is eerily good at simulating "gut feelings".

Yea, the technology to make marathon-distance couriers obsolete has existed since...before the Scythians?

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#48

Post by Tempest1981 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #25
Animats wrote: post #13

From the article: "It is estimated that, of South Korea’s three hundred and twenty pros, only around fifty are able to earn a living on tournament winnings." This isn't going to result in massive unemployment. However, cheating with computer assistance is likely to become a problem, as it is in chess.[1] (The state of the art in computer chess is now roughly at "laptop with off the shelf program can curb-stomp human…

What kind of configuration would you need to run the DeepMind setup? Looking at the wikipedia page if we assume the setup [1] there then it seems like at this time it would be out of the realm of feasibility at this time of setting up this software for cheating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo#Hardware

Kind of cool to know (if you're Lee) that your thinking ability is on par with 1920 CPUs and 280 GPUs!

Re: In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?

#49

Post by eru »

mapt wrote: post #43
eru wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The computer will be able to give you an Elo number just by looking at all the moves you did in a few games. Since the computer can tell for every single move whether you played perfectly or if not, by how much you decreased your chances of winning against perfect competition, you'll be able to get a hundred signals out of a game into your elo calculation, instead of just one win/loss condition. They already do that…

Color me skeptical. The value of things like Elo is they provide a ramping scale with some degree of statistical significance, because they cover play over many games. I don't think a computer is going to be able to extrapolate with a high degree of confidence, because human play is variable from game to game and long-run strategies are non-obvious constructs for the computer. You're thinking in terms of 'The AI has…

Long-run strategies are a human crutch. It's easiest to see when you solved a game mathematically, that you can just value positions independently.

Go hasn't been solved to that level, but it's apparently been solved to higher level than humans ever reached.

I am just parroting http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12677/763 here, so I might as well quote:

"To catch an alleged cheater, Regan takes a set of chess positions played by a single player—ideally 200 or more but his analysis can work with as few as 20—and treats each position like a ques­tion on a multiple-choice exam. The score on this exam translates to an Elo rating, a score Regan calls an Intrinsic Perfor­mance Rating (IPR)."

This approach also allows to score historic players absolutely, instead of only relatively and trying to find sets of overlapping lifetimes until we reach the modern age.

Post reply on HN