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

[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!