Human Go Champion 'Speechless' After 2nd Loss To Machine (phys.org)

Reader chasm22 points to a Phys.org report about the second straight loss of Lee Sedol to AlphaGo, the program developed by Google's DeepMind unit. The human Go champion, Sedol found himself "speechless" after the showdown on Thursday. The human versus machine face-off lasted more than four hours, which to Sedol's credit is a slight improvement over his previous match, which had ended with him resigning nearly half an hour remaining on the clock. "It was a clear loss on my part," Sedol said at a press conference on Thursday. "From the beginning there was no moment I thought I was leading." Demis Hassabis, who heads Google's DeepMind, said, "Because the number of possible Go board positions exceeds the number of atoms in the universe, top players rely heavily on their intuition." Sedol will battle Google's AlphaGo again on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday.

Comments

Milestone

[Lisandro]

Having a competitive Go engine capable of beating a 9-dan player is huge. Huge.

Re:Milestone

[Your.Master]

What's interesting is that the machine should win easily in any number of players of poker, because the statistical analysis at any given point is trivial for a modern processor and the processor has no "tells" and can't be fooled by the meatbag's misdirections. They'd lose individual matches because of bad cards, but in the long run they'd win by playing the odds to a T.

EXCEPT, if one human is much better than the other humans they might be able to take the other humans' money faster than the computer can, by reading their body language etc.. Speed of chip acquisition is not part of the game in and of itself, so it generally would not be included in the optimal computer program, but by quickly consolidating all human chipcounts they can generate an advantage going into a head-to-head competition. Then the computer's slight advantage in accurate statistical evaluation might be overwhelmed by the human advantage in chips going into the final confrontation.

I would bet in a game of 6 person poker where 5 are computers programmed to "perfect play" (discounting that you might play more perfectly by taking advantage of others' weaknesses), and the sixth is an expert human, the expert would win less than 1/6 of the time. And in 6 person poker where 5 are humans, exactly one of whom is an expert, the human probably wins more than 1/6 of the time. Undecided on the case of 6 person poker, 5 humans, all of whom are equally skilled experts.

Re:Milestone

[shawn2772]

As an example, the Watson triumph in Jeopardy was entirely expected but not very significant in terms of comparing human vs. computer thought.

Absolutely wrong.

Watson's win was *far* from expected, and it was very significant. Okay, sure, the machine is faster at buzzing in, but that's not what was interesting or significant. What was interesting was that Watson was able to do fairly free-form natural language processing, and able to draw on not just direct knowledge, but indirect inference, context and even metaphor. What was amazing was that Watson was able to compete on something like a level playing field against humans in this contest of very fuzzy questions, er, answers. Whether Watson won or lost didn't actually matter much. What was amazing was that it was able to compete at all.

Most AI researchers would actually have predicted that Jeopardy was a tougher game for a computer to win than Go.

Re:Milestone

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Impossible. It won't be a single program. It won't run on a single machine. It will require multiple racks of a high-powered data center.

Ha ha, you're funny! This is more or less the exact same thing they said about computers in general only a few short decades ago.

In 10 or 20 years I wouldn't be a bit surprised if a powerful AI was able to easily fit into a toaster-sized box, or phone-sized, or watch-sized.

Seriously, your average musical greeting card or child's toy has more processing power and memory than the entire Department of Defense had in ~1950. Your phone probably has a million times as much, if not more.

-

An anonymous hacker won't have near the resources needed just to boot the thing up.

And no one will ever own a gigabyte of RAM or a terabyte of hard drive space. Never ever!

Re:Milestone - Brute Force

[neoRUR]

Yes this is a big thing. But it is only showing that computer programs are better at pattern recognition and searching then humans in a constrained environment. Go is more complicated than chess, but the computer in both cases is playing the best optimized move that it can and it can definitely search much deeper in the game tree than a human can and in a faster way. The program has no intuition because it is only simulating a certain part of the reasoning process that we use. Humans have the ability to bring in much more external experience and apply it to the problem. Even a 2 year old child could play GO to some level. He can always try a different tactic that the program has not be trained on, think outside the box. Demis Hassabis is a smart guy so I'm sure there will be more to come from this GO program.