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Google's AlphaGo Beats Lee Se-dol In the First Match (theverge.com)
New submitter Fref writes with news from The Verge that "A huge milestone has just been reached in the field of artificial intelligence: AlphaGo, the program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has defeated legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in the first of five historic matches being held in Seoul, South Korea. Lee resigned after about three and a half hours, with 28 minutes and 28 seconds remaining on his clock. "
Lee will face off against AlphaGo again tomorrow and on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Also at the New York Times. Science magazine says the loss may be less significant than it seems at first.
Lee will face off against AlphaGo again tomorrow and on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday. Also at the New York Times. Science magazine says the loss may be less significant than it seems at first.
It might he harder for Lee to beat a computer because he says that he relies heavily on reading his opponent. Unlike poker you can't just calculate odds on everything, and unlike chess there are too many permutations to plan right to the end of a game.
It really depends if he can find a way to figure the computer out without the usual cues he gets from human players.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Go is arguably the hardest game to play (and master) there is."
Hardly. Try Diplomacy some time. Complex negotiation and justifying back-stabbing,
If the computer disdains or is incompetent at unstructured negotiation with other players,
let's see how long it will last with the players ganged up against it.
I respectfully disagree.
Diplomacy with it's self-references and multi-body perturbations is closer to a set of non-linear partial differential equations whose solution is extremely difficult and idiosyncratic and chaotic.
Ever had a disagreement with someone who is basing their behavior upon yours, who in turn is basing their behavior upon theirs? Now add as many as five more players, all intertwining their interactions with yours over time. We are not talking here about enumerating numerical solutions to nice set of equations, either. We are talking about inputs including revenge, boredom, capriciousness, contrariness.
Basically Chess and Go are nerfed versions of real world problems that humans have learned to deal with pretty well.
Even humans have significant problems with these cicular and self-referential domains, see R.D. Laing's book Knots, for example.
In fact let me spell it out for people who've never paid any real attention to Poker.
At any moment, a single human player of (say) Texas Hold 'Em can see some of the state of the game, but not all of it, and, except for the final round of betting (the "river" round) there is still a random element which in most cases can be decisive.
It might seem as though a perfect player would calculate the odds that they've got the best hand, and bet accordingly. But actually that's awful because now the other players can determine from how you bet exactly what cards you've got. Instead then, a good player must "balance" their behaviour so that whatever they do their opponent doesn't learn anything valuable without paying for it. Some high end professional players have balanced play where they'll occasionally bet very strong with total air (ie they know they don't have the best hand) so that even when you suspect they have great cards you can't be sure. Seeing just one hand of this looks completely insane - but they make money every year, because they don't play just one hand, they play thousands of hands and over time this unpredictability makes them hard to beat.
In game design theory, the kinds of politics you describe is normally treated as a form of luck - and as such it makes determining "who is better at this game" a meaningless question. If 3 random people are playing Risk against the best Risk player in the world (the person who understands the game the best), there's a rational argument that their best strategy is to co-operate and eliminate him first (no matter what he does or says or how he behaves). This sort of interaction effectively decouples skill from game success.
This is also why modern game design has generally abandoned games with lots of politics - they effectively all become the same game, and that game is really uninteresting after a while.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...