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Alpha Go Takes the Match, 3-0 (i-programmer.info)

Posted by timothy on from the rhyming-singlet dept.

mikejuk writes: Google's AlphaGo has won the Deep Mind Challenge, by winning the third match in a row of five against the 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol. AlphaGo is now the number three Go player in the world and this is an event that will be remembered for a long time. Most AI experts thought that it would take decades to achieve but now we know that we have been on the right track since the 1980s or earlier. AlphaGo makes use of nothing dramatically new — it learned to play Go using a deep neural network and reinforcement learning, both developments on classical AI techniques. We know now that we don't need any big new breakthroughs to get to true AI. The results of the final two games are going to be interesting but as far as AI is concerned the match really is all over.

5 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. That's quite a leap... by rockmuelle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... From winning a game with simple rules to saying we don't need any more breakthroughs to get to true AI.

    Every time a computer beats a human at a "smart" game, we hear the same thing. And every time, when all is said and done, all we have is a program that can play a game well (and maybe a really aggressive marketing campaign to sell consulting services, Watson).

    Look, we barely understand what intelligence is let alone know what it means to have a computer replicate it. We can have computers perform tasks that we ascribe to smart people and call it intelligence, but that's about it right now.

    And, with deep learning and neural nets, we haven't gained any real insights into intelligence. We just have a black box mathematical function that can play a game.

    1. Re:That's quite a leap... by javilon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No it isn't. Who ever said that winning "Go" games was a step towards AI?

      Winning at a game that cannot be brute forced and is played through strategy and pattern matching is a step towards AI. Having a part of the skills coded by programmers while another part of the skills is learned by the system by playing is a step towards AI.

      --


      When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
    2. Re:That's quite a leap... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think you misunderstood what he meant. The thing is, when chess became winnable by computers some people said the exact same thing (while others quickly redefined intelligence to exclude chess). Meanwhile, in the area of computer vision (and possibly others, but I'm only a computer vision expert, so I couldn't comment) we see that there are still big qualitative differences between how current neural nets perform and how humans perform. I personally think neural networks hold great promise, but something needs to be done. Maybe throwing more neurons at it, wiring them up differently, using different activation functions, ... And even when we get that working, we're still a far stretch away from an independent AI that can set its own goals and ‘live’ in our world.
      And when we are at that level, there are still a few meta-problems about AI that are still unsolved. For example, one of the goals of AI was to figure out how intelligence works, and we haven't yet figured out how neural networks work. It's like we're rebuilding a computer transistor by transistor, we understand how the transistors work, but we haven't got a clue about what the circuits do, or why some RAM cells contain ones and others zeros. It is still possible (I have no opinion either way) that neural networks are at present simply too difficult to comprehend and that we won't really learn anything about intelligence until we discover how to reimplement it without them.

    3. Re:That's quite a leap... by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      No it isn't. It is just a clever use of neural networks on a particular problem.

  2. Re:Stop the hype by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 4, Insightful

    put any 10-year old in front of a "chat bot" and in they will quickly see that something is off.

    Until this week you could have made a similar statement about Go.