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

AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 596 posts

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#61

Post by simonh »

21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

Highly optimised single-function algorithms like this are impressive stuff and can lead to useful tools, but that's it. This gets us no closer to strong AI than a tic tac toe program. Until we have systems that can tackle a wide range of fundamentally different problems and independently adapt strategies for dealing with one class of problems to deal with other classes of problems, systems like Alphago will remain one trick wonders with little relevance to 'true' AI.

Edit: I do understand that the techniques used to implement Alphago can be used to implement other single-function solvers. That doesn't make it a general purpose strong AI.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#62

Post by panic »

Eliezer wrote: post #55
panic wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of how good the deep learning network is on its own, the algorithm described in the DeepMind paper is an improved tree search.

I don't think it's accurate to call AlphaGo 'improved tree search' the way that Deep Blue was improved tree search. You could with equal justice call it an improved neural net.

I'd say both characterizations are accurate. Neither the tree search nor the neural net could have accomplished this on their own. But the essential interface to the algorithm is the tree search: it's picking the best move from a set of legal moves determined by formal game rules. The real world doesn't follow formal game rules. I find it difficult to see the progression from this victory to some kind of real-world AI takeover.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#63

Post by mjn »

taneq wrote: post #35
esturk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never felt playing against what is suppose to be an entire room of machines (wether Deep Blue or Watson) to be fair. What would be fair is to limit the total mass of the computer to say 200kg and leave it at that. What is effectively happening is AlphaGo is running on a distributed system of many, many machines. Even Watson took an entire room. Google is paying a premium to push AlphaGo to win.

It's a proof-of-concept. What they've proved is that the same kind of intelligence required to play Go can be implemented with computer hardware. Before now, software couldn't beat a ranked human player at Go no matter how much computing power we threw at it . Now we can. Give it ten years and, between algorithmic optimizations and advances in processing, you'll have an unbeatable Go app on your phone.

> What they've proved is that the same kind of intelligence required to play Go can be implemented with computer hardware. Before now, software couldn't beat a ranked human player at Go no matter how much computing power we threw at it.

I don't think that's quite true as a description of what we knew about computer Go previously, though it depends on what precisely you mean. Recent systems (meaning the past 10 years, post the resurgence of MCTS) appear to scale to essentially arbitrarily good play as you throw more computing power at them. Play strength scales roughly with the log of computing power, at least as far as anyone tested them (maybe it plateaus at some point, but if so, that hasn't been demonstrated).

So we've had systems that can in principle play to any arbitrary strength, if you can throw enough computing power at them. Though you might legitimately argue: by "in principle" do you mean some truly absurd amount, like more computing power than could conceivably fit in the universe? The answer to that is also no; scaling trends have been such that people expected computer Go to beat humans anywhere from, well, around now [1], to 5 to 10 years from now [2].

The two achievements of the team here, at least as I see them, are: 1) they managed to actually throw orders of magnitude more computing power at it than other recent systems have used, in part by making use of GPUs, which the other strong computer-Go systems don't use (the AlphaGo cluster as reported in the Nature paper uses 1202 CPUs and 176 GPUs), and 2) improved the scaling curve by algorithmic improvements over vanilla MCTS (the main subject of their Nature paper). Those are important achievements, but I think not philosophical ones, in the sense of figuring out how to solve something that we previously didn't know how to solve even given arbitrary computing power.

While I don't agree with everything in it, I also found this recent blog post / paper on the subject interesting: http://www.milesbrundage.com/blog-posts/alphago-and-ai-progr...

[1] A 2007 survey article suggested that mastering Go within 10 years was probably feasible; not certain, but something that the author wouldn't bet against. I think that was at least a somewhat widely held view as of 2007. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/cracking-go

[2] A 2012 interview though that mastering Go would need a mixture of inevitable scaling improvements plus probably one significant new algorithmic idea, also a reasonably widely held view as of 2012. https://gogameguru.com/computer-go-demystified-interview-mar...

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#64

Post by lololomg »

esturk wrote: post #24
sethbannon wrote: post #7

I was at the 2003 match of Garry Kasparov vs Deep Junior -- the strongest chess player of all time vs what was at that point the strongest chess playing computer in history. Kasparov drew that match, but it was clear it was the last stand of homo sapiens in the man vs machine chess battle. Back then, people took solace in the game of Go. Many boldly and confidently predicted we wouldn't see a computer beat the Go wor…

I've never felt playing against what is suppose to be an entire room of machines (wether Deep Blue or Watson) to be fair. What would be fair is to limit the total mass of the computer to say 200kg and leave it at that. What is effectively happening is AlphaGo is running on a distributed system of many, many machines. Even Watson took an entire room. Google is paying a premium to push AlphaGo to win.

Today a tiny $300 desktop computer can beat any human at chess. It only took a few years after the Deep Blue vs Kasparov game.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#65

Post by CamperBob2 »

onion2k wrote: post #52
21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out. As hard as writing AI for a problem space like "how to win at Go" is, it's several orders of magnitude easier than creating a general AI with the self-awareness required to see us as a threat.

The interesting thing is that this algorithm taught itself to master the game. If you're writing a chess engine, you just "write the AI for the problem space" in a few dozen lines of code, as you put it, and let brute force do the rest. In the case of DeepMind, faced with a game where a traversal approach is numerically impossible, its programmers gave it the ability to improve by playing against itself.

That's the difference between a neural net -- which until about an hour ago was a phrase that reliably set off my snake-oil detector -- and a simple tree search. DeepMind just beat a Go master... and nobody can say exactly how it did it.

That's a big deal.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#66

Post by pfisch »

onion2k wrote: post #52
21 wrote: post #12

The thing that was supposed to take at least 10 years happened. Only last month people were still saying that no way AlphaGo will beat the champion and that it will be crushed. Today everybody will have seen it coming and say that it was normal. Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out.

Yet people will still tell that worrying about AI taking over is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars, and that this is a problem at least 50 years out. As hard as writing AI for a problem space like "how to win at Go" is, it's several orders of magnitude easier than creating a general AI with the self-awareness required to see us as a threat.

In other words, it could be created in the next 10 to 20 years.

We should be taking steps to outlaw black box algorithms right now but I'm sure we won't.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#67

Post by lololomg »

agildehaus wrote: post #59
esturk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never felt playing against what is suppose to be an entire room of machines (wether Deep Blue or Watson) to be fair. What would be fair is to limit the total mass of the computer to say 200kg and leave it at that. What is effectively happening is AlphaGo is running on a distributed system of many, many machines. Even Watson took an entire room. Google is paying a premium to push AlphaGo to win.

Has Google talked about the amount of computing resources they're throwing at this match? I'd be very interested to know.

They did not say exactly but something like a couple hundred GPUs

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#68

Post by Eliezer »

agildehaus wrote: post #59
esturk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never felt playing against what is suppose to be an entire room of machines (wether Deep Blue or Watson) to be fair. What would be fair is to limit the total mass of the computer to say 200kg and leave it at that. What is effectively happening is AlphaGo is running on a distributed system of many, many machines. Even Watson took an entire room. Google is paying a premium to push AlphaGo to win.

Has Google talked about the amount of computing resources they're throwing at this match? I'd be very interested to know.

I'd guess more on the order of 10,000 GPUs.

Re: AlphaGo beats the world champion Lee Sedol in first of five matches

#70

Post by nefitty »

What do you guys think of the future progress on the game Go? Will our only chance against AI be to team up with an AI to beat the lone AI? Like in this article about centaur chess players: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2014/12/features/bra... (2014) It all sounds very Gundam Wing to me.
Post reply on HN