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Google's AlphaGo AI Beats Lee Se-dol Again, Wins Go Series 4-1 (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article at The Verge about Korean grandmaster's fifth and final game with Google's AlphaGo AI: After suffering its first defeat in the Google DeepMind Challenge Match on Sunday, the Go-playing AI AlphaGo has beaten world-class player Lee Se-dol for a fourth time to win the five-game series 4-1 overall. The final game proved to be a close one, with both sides fighting hard and going deep into overtime. The win came after a "bad mistake" made early in the game, according to DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, leaving AlphaGo "trying hard to claw it back."
Most likely. But that's the case with just about any game.
Can you really guarantee to find fair games of anything from tic-tac-toe, to chess, to draughts, to reversi, to Risk, to poker, to anything at all online? Go was pretty much out-there on its on in this regard but ordinary PC Go software has been able to beat amateurs for a few years now. This is orders-of-magnitude in terms of a leap in capability but nothing that would change the situation for the majority of people playing it.
Pretty much the only "games" that can be fair are if you can guarantee it's against a human without any kind of possibility they could be plugging moves into a computer at any point. That's a vanishingly small amount of plays, pretty much limited to strict competitions (and even professional chess competitions have seen people use toilet breaks to illicitly get computer analysis of the board state on their phones!).
What I want is not a computer player that never wins, nor one that wins all the times. Those are EASY to program in comparison to one that CONVINCINGLY challenges you enough that you have to play slightly better each time in order to win, without trouncing you or letting you walk all over it.
That's the REAL hard problem in any kind of game "AI" - the "gamer's Turing Test" - how to lose/win convincingly without people knowing you're a bot.
Try playing a pool game on a computer, for example. They usually go from "whoops, missed a blindingly obvious easy shot" to "four-cushion bounces, jump the ball, curve into the other balls coming back from the cushions, and tap one into the nominated pocket" without anything convincing in between.
Like Left4Dead's "director" - we need to adjust to the player just enough to make it fun but that if they're obviously letting their guard down, we take advantage. Unlike the 80's arcade games that had to be punishingly hard but just easy enough at first for you to want to put money in but not to waste too much time in front of, modern video games need to be easy enough to pick up and get you into and keep you coming back for more (and spending some DLC) without feeling like you're playing a script, trouncing everything, or need to spend a fortune just to stay competitive.
Probably, but the fourth game was rather incredible and unlikely to be repeated again, even without changing alpha go. Lee took the corners and forced go into the much larger middle, Opposite of how he played game 2. This probably was the perfect setup to best alpha go, because it was too big an area to go deep into all possibilities of moves, yet to complex an area for the general strength of positions to be understood. They way the centre unfolded ended up a dream knife for Lee, Lee built to it when he saw it, but it emerged unexpectedly from either player and seems to be an incredibly rare number of setups where it would work out (wet know this because some lees moves before 70 could have been even better to take the middle). Lee was amazing to see it and take advantage of it, but you could probably attempt the same strategy against Alfa go a million times and taking the centre like that would never work.