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What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

timharford.com

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Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#51

Post by dsacco »

mda wrote: post #45
GuB-42 wrote: post #35

Projects like DeepBlue and AlphaGo are not fundamental innovation nor research, they are just PR stunts that show the expertise of the company making them. TBH, winning a game of chess or go has little value in itself, except for the limited market of selling chess or go software. The reason they are doing that is mostly for publicity. IBM makes computers, and they show how good they are at it by having one beat top…

Funny that up until 2016 go was regarded as one of the most difficult games that computers could master, and now that it is solved it becomes a PR stunt? Would you claim the same in 2015?

Ah, just like mathematics. Once proved, a result is trivial, but before it’s proved, a conjecture is a hard problem.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#52

Post by lkozma »

mda wrote: post #45
GuB-42 wrote: post #35

Projects like DeepBlue and AlphaGo are not fundamental innovation nor research, they are just PR stunts that show the expertise of the company making them. TBH, winning a game of chess or go has little value in itself, except for the limited market of selling chess or go software. The reason they are doing that is mostly for publicity. IBM makes computers, and they show how good they are at it by having one beat top…

Funny that up until 2016 go was regarded as one of the most difficult games that computers could master, and now that it is solved it becomes a PR stunt? Would you claim the same in 2015?

Yes, I think von Neumann made this claim somewhere already that AI is a moving target, because once some task is automated it doesn't seem intelligent anymore.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#53

Post by klmr »

d--b wrote: post #5

Mmmh, I am not a specialist and I don't know the numbers, but it seems to me that fundamental research is not less active than it used to be. Physics made a lot of progress in materials (nano tech, weird polymers, and so on), in building batteries, in finding the higgs boson and gravitational waves, and I'm sure plenty of other fields. Medical research has advanced a lot with the invention of CRISPR. CS has grown a l…

> Medical research has advanced a lot with the invention of CRISPR.

You are overestimating the importance of CRISPR. Don’t get me wrong — it is hugely important and innovative. But it’s not even the most important biomedical research innovation of recent years (I’d give that title to RNA-seq or more generally next-gen sequencing technology; but there are several contenders).

But at any rate all the innovations you list are — at least partly — driven by fundamental research in the public sector, not private companies.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#54

Post by GuB-42 »

mda wrote: post #45
GuB-42 wrote: post #35

Projects like DeepBlue and AlphaGo are not fundamental innovation nor research, they are just PR stunts that show the expertise of the company making them. TBH, winning a game of chess or go has little value in itself, except for the limited market of selling chess or go software. The reason they are doing that is mostly for publicity. IBM makes computers, and they show how good they are at it by having one beat top…

Funny that up until 2016 go was regarded as one of the most difficult games that computers could master, and now that it is solved it becomes a PR stunt? Would you claim the same in 2015?

It was a hard problem, and that's what makes it an effective PR stunt.

Google was working on machine learning for some practical application like image classification, better targeted ads or whatever thing Google does. A bunch of people then came up with the idea: "hey, we have all that AI stuff, we may be able to use it for computer go". And Google replied with "OK, sounds like good publicity, here is a budget, we also have a bunch of servers and if you need help, feel free to ask our machine learning department".

It is like making an industrial robot that can crush concrete blocks or whatever difficult but not that useful task. Maybe it is a huge deal because all previous attempts failed, but the point here is not that years of research in concrete crushing robots have payed out, but rather that recent advancement in practical engineering made it possible, and maybe even easy.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#55

Post by marcosdumay »

mda wrote: post #45
GuB-42 wrote: post #35

Projects like DeepBlue and AlphaGo are not fundamental innovation nor research, they are just PR stunts that show the expertise of the company making them. TBH, winning a game of chess or go has little value in itself, except for the limited market of selling chess or go software. The reason they are doing that is mostly for publicity. IBM makes computers, and they show how good they are at it by having one beat top…

Funny that up until 2016 go was regarded as one of the most difficult games that computers could master, and now that it is solved it becomes a PR stunt? Would you claim the same in 2015?

Any game is a PR stunt, difficulty does not matter. It's not about how hard it is to solve, but on how many places you can apply them.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#56

Post by mannykannot »

l3robot wrote: post #40

"It was a time when companies weren’t afraid to invest in basic science." No they were probably afraid, but they were forced to invest in science by states. AT&T did not decide to invest massively in science and risky projects like Unix, they were forced to. Please stop thinking companies are behind innovation. A great piece of article that demestify this myth: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/11/tech-…

AT&T was forced by the government to invest massively in Unix? That does not fit with what I have heard about its origins, which was as a shoestring project of Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, and a few other collaborators [1]. If anything, the government prevented AT&T from following up on the initial development, as part of its anti-trust measures that allowed AT&T a telephone monopoly while preventing it from expanding into computing and related technologies.

The article you link to may describe the current state of affairs, but it does not properly characterize the state of affairs in the 1950s and beyond, when many major technology corporations had research laboratories. While their activities were nominally directed towards future products and profitability, in practice this was interpreted quite freely, leading to things like Unix, as well as scientific work.

[1]http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#57

Post by pault »

pjc50 wrote: post #13
cdancette wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think charity improves their public image more than fundamental research, that will be known only by specialists. Moreover, they have large tax incentives for charitable activities (not sure if they have for research too) For the military computers, they had a clear interest in doing so, and the military keeps most of their research hidden, so I think it's not really comparable to public research

> large tax incentives for charitable activities People misunderstand how these work. You don't get money by giving away money. What happens is that the charity gets the money as if it were pre-tax, that's all. (Trying to get the money back into the company from the charity after you've got the tax break is fraud)

I'm under the impression that it works like this: I make $100,000 this year, donate $20,000 to charity, pay taxes on $80,000 in income. Is this not accurate? My understanding is that it can save you money if you're just over the bottom end of a tax bracket. Not sure if that applies to corporations too.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#58

Post by pault »

vog wrote: post #30
tobyhinloopen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An article about AI revolution and we still having problems keeping a database alive. Isn't that a bit ironic?

Even more ironic is using a database for static content at all. Right now, we (as a society/industry) are unable to deploy well-known best practices of 5 years ago: https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/EditingPublishingSeparati... (In software development, it is even worse. I can't find the source to cite, but the saying is along the lines of: The mainstream programming languages and paradigms are mostly at the state o…

Isn't that the case for all industries? How many of the battery technologies currently being researched will be commercially available in the next 10 years?

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#59

Post by marcosdumay »

lustig wrote: post #44
nottorp wrote: post #37

I'm not current, so please enlighten me: Is "deep learning" just a new buzzword for neural networks, or is there something extra?

Technically yes, most often it's about stacking more layers in neural networks, making them "deep". However, there is some merit to the new hype since stacking more layers worked way better than anyone previously working with neural networks and ML thought it would. But in theory you could generalize deep learning to other methods than neural networks, it's basically about creating way more complex models than those…

> it's basically about creating way more complex models than those used in previous research and feeding them lots of data

Those are instructions for over-fitting. Deep learning neural networks escape from this problem somehow, but it's not a given that other models would escape it too.

Re: What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation

#60

Post by jorgemf »

GuB-42 wrote: post #35

Projects like DeepBlue and AlphaGo are not fundamental innovation nor research, they are just PR stunts that show the expertise of the company making them. TBH, winning a game of chess or go has little value in itself, except for the limited market of selling chess or go software. The reason they are doing that is mostly for publicity. IBM makes computers, and they show how good they are at it by having one beat top…

Be aware that a lot of problems can be transformed with a linear transformation into basic and well know problems like SAT [1]. This automatically means that a lot of problems can be solved with the same algorithm. Using problems as chess or go is more about fun when doing research that other thing.

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

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