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

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

timharford.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 116 posts

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

#61

Post by mannykannot »

nkurz wrote: post #25
payne92 wrote: post #17

This article is off in so many dimensions. Fundamental research is not less active, but it's happening in different places (e.g. the Google Brain team). Find the most profitable companies and you'll find the research. And to suggest a computer Go player, taught in a few days, is a "marginal improvement" over decades of "AI research": as my kids say, "wut?" If anything, today's deep learning driven AI is a prime examp…

And to suggest a computer Go player, taught in a few days, is a "marginal improvement" over decades of "AI research": as my kids say, "wut?" Maybe I'm the one that has it backward, but I'm pretty sure that Harford would not agree with the statement that Alpha Go Zero is only a "marginal improvement". To the contrary, he says that Alpha Go is an "outlier", and uses it as an example of the sort of "speculative research…

There seems to be a mismatch between the headline and the article itself. I see this quite often, and I think it is often due to headlines being written by editors, or even editorial assistants.

The author's choice of examples, featuring a counter-example prominently, seems odd - perhaps it is to capitalize on the interest in AlphaGo Zero. The article is something of an anachronism, in that it would have worked better immediately after Deep Blue (or even after Watson/Jeopardy).

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

#62

Post by gech »

nine_k wrote: post #42
wallflower wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the science fiction series "The Three-Body Problem" (highly recommended), it makes a very compelling argument that fundamental research is the most important investment in the future. For example, fusion drives, not traditional stored rocket propellant engines, will be necessary to navigate between planets and the outer solar system. Also, existing known behaviors/laws of physics aside, the book posits th…

The mother planet reaps no material benefits from colonizing another star. Those groups who colonize it get a world if their own. So interests of Earth governments are not aligned with star travel, and only marginally aligned with colonizing e.g. Mars. Those groups who want to ho there will have to do it themselves. (See Elon Musk.)

Hmm. What about an escape mechanism for its people at least? Or scarce mineral resources that could be brought back?

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

#63

Post by yters »

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…

It'd only be innovative if they'd discovered a general approach that applies to many problems without tweaking, and even better if it learned from a comparable size problem set as humans do. As it is, even something as generic as AlphaGo Zero is highly customized for the particular problem domain, and requires millions of games.

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

#64

Post by nradov »

pault wrote: post #57
pjc50 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's not quite accurate. Charitable donations are (generally) deductible on income tax returns. But tax brackets apply at marginal levels. There is no way to actually "save" money by donating to charity. The only exception is if you donate goods and then cheat by valuing those goods at above the market rate; some charities used to facilitate this by giving out receipts for inflated values but the IRS has been cracking down on that.

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

#65

Post by pjc50 »

pault wrote: post #57
pjc50 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I make $100,000 this year, donate $20,000 to charity, pay taxes on $80,000 in income. Is this not accurate?

That sounds accurate.

> it can save you money if you're just over the bottom end of a tax bracket.

That sounds like a misunderstanding of tax brackets - if the brackets are (e.g) 20% up to $80k and 40% above that, with no deductions, what do you pay if you earn $80,001?

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

#66

Post by pinouchon »

JustFinishedBSG wrote: post #41
dsacco wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I understand your cynicism in the practical applicability of a chess or go-playing AI, I think you are significantly underestimating the theoretical innovations contributed to the field every time these models are substantially improved. Much of the work that goes into improving something like AlphaGo is cross-applicable and cross-pollinated to other research projects, and gradually trickles out into other doma…

> I think you are significantly underestimating the theoretical innovations contributed to the field every time these models are substantially improved. I think you are overestimating, there isn't a single interesting theoretical insight in AlphaGo's papers.

I think folding the update rule inside the MCTS loop (in alphaGO Zero) is genius.

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

#67

Post by nine_k »

gech wrote: post #62
nine_k wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mother planet reaps no material benefits from colonizing another star. Those groups who colonize it get a world if their own. So interests of Earth governments are not aligned with star travel, and only marginally aligned with colonizing e.g. Mars. Those groups who want to ho there will have to do it themselves. (See Elon Musk.)

Hmm. What about an escape mechanism for its people at least? Or scarce mineral resources that could be brought back?

Scarce minerals from the asteroid belt? Already in R&D (google "Planetary Resources"). Shipping anything in bulk from another star system? Unlikely even with the fabled "teleportation" tech.

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

#68

Post by teabee89 »

I highly recommend this talk "Greatness cannot be planned: the Myth of the Objective" by Kenneth Stanley: he created picbreeder.org (evolutionary art platform) and realized that if an interesting state is set as an objective, then it is extremely hard to reach it from the initial state with AI algorithms, because you need to move away sometimes a lot, from local optima.

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

#69

Post by jjaredsimpson »

makomk wrote: post #22

The big question this fails to ask is: full employment of what kind? Recent research has found that nearly all of the net job growth is in "alternative work", meaning temporary jobs, contract workers, freelancers, etc: https://qz.com/851066/almost-all-the-10-million-jobs-created... Now think about the kind of innovation that companies like Uber and Deliveroo represent. While ostensibly they might be tech companies, i…

Criticism of the -- what I believe to be -- inevitable post-work post-scarcity economy is rooted in the false idea that employment provides meaning to those employed.

But proclaiming the "Value of Work" is just arguing for the "Merits of Drudgery."

I can't wait to not work ever again. The weak reply that, "doctors have valuable employment that gives them meaning," is completely beside the point. Doctors like helping people or the challenge of solving an ailment or they like the high status of being a doctor in society or the high pay.

But they don't like paperwork, or interacting with insurance companies. Most work is like that. Low status, repetitive, boring, meaningless. Trading the best hours of the day of the best years of your youth is a terrible bargain, but persists because it is connected to survival and status.

Break the connection and humanity prospers.

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

#70

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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?

The problem with the AI Effect is that people keep expecting solving one toy problem or another to give us some insight into how to break Moravec's paradox for the general case. Statistical learning, especially deep learning, have been massive advances precisely because they at least allow us to break the paradox for specific problems, where we happen to have large datasets.
Post reply on HN