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

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

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 88 posts

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

#51

Post by huytersd »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #20
huytersd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Waymo does better than a vast percentage of human drivers. It’s here already.

But the average hour is not driven by the average driver, better drivers drive more hours, so it has to be better than the average driver in order to result in fewer incidents.

There’s no reason better drivers drive more hours. You can be a shit semi driver. That being said, it’s an irrelevant comment. If it’s at average now this is the worst it can get and it’s already way above average.

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

#52

Post by btilly »

banannaise wrote: post #39
HackerThemAll wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every measure of complexity is limited in some way. So they are all poor in various ways. That doesn't make them not worthwhile.

Total game states is one measure. What does it take to solve the game?

You can also look at the branching factor, how many moves are there to make on average. For chess, it's 20. For go, it's something like 300.

You can also look at how long it takes from a move to seeing its negative consequences. A bad move in chess is frequently visible in very few moves. You lose a piece. You lose an exchange. Often these sequences are virtually forced. By contrast, the consequences of a bad move in Go are usually not visible for 50 moves or more. And there is nothing forced about the sequence that gets there.

You can also look at how likely good players are to play similar games. Many chess games have been played over and over again. People sometimes play half the game out of a memorized opening sequence. By contrast, it is plausible that no Go game has ever been played twice on a 9x9 board. It is very unlikely that any Go gamme has been played twice on a 13x13 or 21x21 board.

You can also look at how big the skill gaps between humans get. In my experience, a 1 stone difference in Go is roughly a similar skill gap to 200 points of Elo in chess. A rank beginner who barely moves the pieces may have a 400 rating. No human has ever reached a 2900 rating. That's 12.5 levels. By contrast Go has 30 levels of amateur (kyo), another 9 for serious players (dan), and then the skill range among professionals is about another 3. That's 42 levels of fairly recognizable skill differences between humans. Which speaks to how much more there is to learn about Go than chess. (Even more so when you realize how much of advancing in chess is a matter of making fewer mistakes. By contrast advancing in Go is much more about integrating better principles.)

No matter how you look at it, Go is much more complex than chess.

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

#54

Post by bluecalm »

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…

Complexity of the game has nothing to do with the number of legal positions. It's very easy to design a game with arbitrary number of positions which is very simple. While go might be more complex than chess using a more reasonable measure this argument was used to for arguing nonsense in scientific papers in the past (that some poker games are more complicated than chess because they have more possible states).

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

#55

Post by btilly »

kibwen wrote: post #35
HackerThemAll wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bo…

We have more theory for deterministic games. That doesn't mean that it is harder to solve them to a human level.

Computers got to being better than humans in both Go and poker in 2016. The difference is that https://www.deepstack.ai/ was solvable by academics with normal research grants. The training for the final version of AlphaGo is estimated at about $35 million. And who knows how many other versions were created?

Yes, actually solving Go and Civilization are both impossible. But I would be shocked if playing Civilization at a human level was too hard for us to solve with current machine learning techniques.

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

#56

Post by bluecalm »

btilly wrote: post #52
banannaise wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every measure of complexity is limited in some way. So they are all poor in various ways. That doesn't make them not worthwhile. Total game states is one measure. What does it take to solve the game? You can also look at the branching factor, how many moves are there to make on average. For chess, it's 20. For go, it's something like 300. You can also look at how long it takes from a move to seeing its negative conse…

One good measure is how much resources a computer program needs to have to play optimally. This is hard to measure as we don't have optimal programs but maybe "how much resources is needed to play better than the best human" is a sensible measure as well. Go wins on this one but only marginally.

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

#57

Post by pinkmuffinere »

bevekspldnw wrote: post #45
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes this is my point - the home is a hard place to operate in but less potential for lethal outcomes. If we can solve home robotics I think cars would be easier. Also, a robot that replaces a housekeeper would have a huge market. I’d pay a handsome sum to have perfectly cleaned kitchen and bathrooms every day when I wake up.

For clarity, I’ll call out the areas where I think we disagree:

> “the home … [has] less potential for lethal outcomes.”

I don’t think this is true. Roads already have systems in place to make them safer, and people are aware of the dangers. This isn’t the case at home, and useful home robots certainly have the ability to cause serious injuries/deaths

> “If we can solve home robotics I think cars would be easier”

I also think cars are easier. However, I think this is _why_ we’ve made more progress towards solving self driving.

> “I’d pay a handsome sum to have perfectly cleaned kitchen and bathrooms every day when I wake up.”

When you say “perfectly cleaned rooms”, I think “better than you can get with a 90th percentile hired cleaner”. I suspect useful home robots might be 10 years out, but I’m doubtful we’ll get “perfectly cleaned rooms” from a commercial home robot and using the above criteria within even the next 50 years. Maybe controversial, but I think AGI might be easier, lol

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

#58

Post by ghaff »

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 will happily pay 10k-20k extra for a self-driving car, and there are industries in which even more cost makes sense. Customers are less likely to pay that for a robot that does your chores

It would be at least an upper middle class purchase at that level but it depends how generally useful it was. People pay thousands of dollars a year for a housekeeper to come by.

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

#59

Post by imiric »

huytersd wrote: post #12
dumpsterlid wrote: post #2

[flagged]

What dysfunctional products. I use atleast 7 Google products during my day and they all work really well and for free .

> for free

Strange to see this popular misconception on HN.

Adtech products are certainly not free/gratis. You're paying with your data, usage and attention. They're extracting far more value out of you than you do from their products.

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

#60

Post by [deleted] »

jsheard wrote: post #23
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.

> “Driving” is solved. Driving with humans on the road - doing unpredictable human things - is far off still. Plus there's serious questions about liability with self driving cars which are still unresolved in most of the world - if the goal is to have vehicles operate themselves with no human supervision, who goes to jail when they kill someone? Despite all of the progress that's been made with AI it's mostly been i…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN