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AlphaGo's next move

deepmind.com

71–80 of 179 posts

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#71

One common comment from Go players at all levels up to 9-dan pros is that they don't understand many of the moves. The same will happen as more and more advanced AIs are used in the real world. Yes, we do not completely understand the workings of current advanced neural networks either but the effects are still contained as they are not general enough to cause unintended impact outside their domains. This could have…

They don't understand the move probably the AI has a memory depth that is way beyond any human, some of those moves are the best possible look aheads for that situation

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#72
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and physical prowess was never dominated by humans anyway. We are surrounded by creatures which can fly and swim and sprint far better than any human ever could. But our minds is what separates us from the beasts. We've never been second place in the thought competition.

Aren't we actually better at endurance running than any other animal?

Human plus bicycle is the most efficient.

Which may seem like a snide point (and a ripoff of Steve Jobs) but seriously it hints at where things could go with AI.

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#73
post #49
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, Go is a challenging game for computers but even more so for humans. However, for computers, Go is not more challenging than translation, speech to text or driving or understanding a comic book. The progression of superhuman play in famous board games has gone as checker->chess-> go. The more a game relies on memory,tactics and evaluation speed, the quicker it falls. In terms of commonly played perfect inform…

10 years ago when I was learning Go. I can beat the strongest bot within months of learning the rule. Super amateur human play in Go AI is barely 5 years ago, if that.

That doesn't affect my core point: many of the things that humans have commonly associated with intelligence have been the first to fall. In hindsight it makes sense, we mistakenly assumed that there was such a thing as a universal rank of difficulty centered on what humans find hard to reason about.

More to your point, my decades remark had a weaker notion of amateur. For each game, we've had something that could beat most humans for decades. But you're right, that's not a useful distinction.

If we look just at Go the decades remark is somewhat of a stretch. Go has been especially difficult, requiring more intelligent algorithms in order to solve branching and state evaluation (and the latter in particular, is a function too complex to fit in human consciousness).

But progress has been occurring for years. On 9x9 boards MCTS bots have been stronger than most humans since about 2007, 10 years ago. For 19x19 it's true, if we pick 4 or 5 dan as better than most amateurs then that's 6/7 years.

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#74
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think you are missing the point. The gift DeepMind made with the published self-play matches is not really aimed at the machine learning but rather to the Go community. And over at /r/baduk they are appreciating it, as it will allow them to gain further insights into the gameplay. So this is definitely _not_ 'nothing'.

what I meant (which was not clear) is that, for what I understand, if you compare the greatness of the tool which is AlphaGo and the "gift" of Google, then I'm inclined to thing that Google actually gives almost nothing. Now I understand that they don't have to (a great Go players doesn't have to teach for sure) but I can not thing their gift is meaningful. Basically, if I have 1000$, I'll share 1$. But if I have 100…

Once they release the new architecture paper it'll be a matter of time to have not only games, but also a working ai of a similar strength.

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#75
So, a question bordering on the philosophical :

What can be done to prepare for the end of human supremacy, and quite likely human civilization? For instance, as a software developer it feels almost pointless to continue improving at my craft if AI systems will surpass me within 2-4 years (even if the pessimists are right about it taking 5-10 years, that's still an awfully small timeframe).

Likewise, it feels a little pointless to work on any endeavor - technical or otherwise - including but not limited to AI research itself. From a purely practical standpoint just getting up to speed on AI research will take a solid 5+ years, and from a moral vantage point I'm not sure that's even a defensible career given the obvious and hugely negative implications that field will have for human civilization.

Even in artistic endeavors, humans will soon be second fiddle to our own creations - so it's not like there's any "point" to starting down that path either.

Is it time to just engage in a hedonistic, nihilistic, fest of gluttony and "fun" while that's still possible? Honestly, news like this just makes me consider ending it all : it feels like none of us will have much of a future before long.

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#76
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and physical prowess was never dominated by humans anyway. We are surrounded by creatures which can fly and swim and sprint far better than any human ever could. But our minds is what separates us from the beasts. We've never been second place in the thought competition.

Aren't we actually better at endurance running than any other animal?

Our superhumans are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Karnazes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#77
post #4
post #2

Congratulations to Deepmind and Google for this tremendous achievement. However, it is disappointing that the code and model will not be released publicly after Alphago finishes competitive play. It's one thing to say that an apple, once dropped, will fall to the ground, but another to describe its motion as 1/2at^2 + vt.

They did announce that they would release a teaching tool which will show AlphaGo's analysis of Go positions, as well as the paper explaining how to build your own. Not only do you have the principle and the formula behind it, but also a little physics simulator tool! At this point, it is hard to complain.

> At this point, it is hard to complain.

Actually, it's very easy to complain. If they released the model, people could generate arbitrarily many self-play games instead of depending on DM to release 50, could create arbitrarily many tools using the model instead of depending on DM to create and maintain a single tool, and could verify the results of training a clone based on even sketchy descriptions of the methods instead of depending on DM releasing a detailed enough whitepaper and then guessing at whether a reimplementation is competitive or not. DM is only being 'generous' if you ignore how releasing the model is easier for them and superior for us in every way.

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit hyperbolic. Go at it's heart is a pretty basic game, just tricky combinatorics. The fact that you can do unsupervised learning simplifies it even more. I think there are much better true indicators, such as better translation, speech to text, auto driving, etc.

I think you are being hyperbolic here. Go is in a lot of respect much more challenging than machine translation, speech to text and auto-driving. All of the latter problems you described have had solutions for decades whereas Alpha Go is literally state of the art. It even uses proprietary hardware (TPU's) and was essentially engineered by one if not the most elite ML lab in the world. Their solution consists of an e…

The author isn't hyperbolic. The problems that require what we call common sense continue to defeat all AI's. These board games don't require that. It comes down to pattern recognition, heuristic search, and good hardware. The examples of language and driving are great as the AI's only seem to do well on really narrow situations that require no greater understanding of context. And far as common sense, there's only a handful of projects like Cyc that were trying to teach it to machines.

Humans take 10-20 years of semi-supervised learning to acquire this combination of common sense, knowledge, and problem-solving. It also happens in stages where the infants or especially young children have brains in overdrive taking in everything followed by stages that are more selective about what they take in and solidify. Training AI's to be smart for real, common sense and all, might take over a decade of data for the first one unless this problem can be decomposed. Still will take years of similar experiences.

Re: AlphaGo's next move

#80

So, a question bordering on the philosophical : What can be done to prepare for the end of human supremacy, and quite likely human civilization? For instance, as a software developer it feels almost pointless to continue improving at my craft if AI systems will surpass me within 2-4 years (even if the pessimists are right about it taking 5-10 years, that's still an awfully small timeframe). Likewise, it feels a littl…

You need to get out of whatever bubble you're living in. Human civilization is doing fine. Machine learning will do some stuff but not major changes at the civilization level in the next 40 years.

Walk into any real world business today. There's a huge amount of need for humans, because fundamentally business is about trust not productivity.

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