Slashdot Mirror
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."
letting the human live after the first game.
I imagine the next version will go 5-0 as these kind of things tend to be iterative in nature.
and at that point go will be as bad as chess and it will be nigh impossible to find a fair game online.
Others have said it before: This is about as meaningless as the observation that a pocket calculator (or a completely inanimate slide-rule or book of mathematical tables) is better at calculating than a human being. It does not indicate intelligence in the mechanism used in any way.
Because here is the thing: If you make this a general competition, not just this extremely specialized one, it will turn out that Se-dol has quit a few other skills that AlphaGo has no chance to master, ever. It is also no surprise that an algorithm and machine optimized to do just one tiny, restricted and extremely well defined thing does better at it than a general-purpose Intelligence doing this thing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
was that really an "early mistake" or was it part of the plan? how do we know?
I get tired of hearing people say that Go is a game that required creativity to win. It doesn't and if anything, this result demonstrates that.
"AlphaGo's algorithm uses a combination of machine learning and tree search techniques, combined with extensive training, both from human and computer play."
It's a game, based on pre-defined rules.It's just more opague and vague than chess.
If Google AI you can beat Lee Se-dol at Go, can it beat the IRS and Her Majesty's government at Tax Evasion? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... http://www.theverge.com/2016/1... http://www.thelocal.it/2016021... http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi... http://news.yahoo.com/italy-cl...
This was a great proof of concept for some "intuition" in AI, one of the behavioral aspects people believed hard to reproduce.
Now I am really looking forward to see the real applications for this, and their consequences:
- smart AI assistants, "a Siri that actually works" and similar
- AI assisted science
- AI assisted healthcare
There is a great interview with Demis Hassabis about this. There is hope for noticeable progress in mass products within 3-5 years.
This new tech will help a lot of people directly, and the related mass unemployment threat should force us to adopt better social policies. I already start hearing about base income experiments and the like more often.
I've been following the matches with the same expectation and anger I felt in 1997 during the Kasparov & Deep Blue rematch. The final result has been similar, and although it has been well reasoned that chess and go are pretty different games and Deep Blue and AlphaGo are pretty different machines, the bittersweet sensation is identical. I had a naive hope in the human superiority just for a little more time. I was pretty sad after the final game: Lee Sedol seemed really disappointed and sad himself. I can't imagine the pressure he's felt throughout the event, and his face -that's my impression- seemed to tell us "I've failed you all". He later told in the press conference that he felt he could have done more in the games -I'm sure he'd like to play more games to test himself again- and I wonder what could have happened if the matches would have been played without general knowledge. Feeling that kind of coverage must have been really stressful. If you ever read this, Mr. Sedol, thank you. And please, don't ever feel disappointed, you've done a fantastic job.
We also say things like, Go is a lot further down the pecking order than people thought in terms of advanced AI problems. That's for sure.
Texas Holdem' poker will be a lot harder to crack than this. And after that, there's still a long way to go.
American v American is the only worthy battle. A chinaman in a battle of wits is like a Trump in the Whitehouse - crazy from the start.
He's likely to be remembered as the last human being to beat a Go AI on tournaments.
Move 78, in particular, was so good that his partners and commentators in China have already called it "the hand of God", but it really was one of those things which happens once in a blue moon, even for a player like Sedol.
that the human was not a good player, then. I mean, if the computer wasn't perfect by losing once, surely the human must be crap at Go if it loses more than once, right?
Or is this editorialising against the meatbag and not allowed?
Come back to me when it can win at Roulette.
... by saying "I Knew I shouldn't have had those two scotches before the game" and winking. Because when it comes to being a B*tard, humans can beat a computer every time!
From the dictionary:
Artificial Intelligence:
1
: a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers
2
: the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior
Did you catch that? simulation. imitate.
A simple brute-force chess-playing algorithm absolutely qualifies by this definition. It is an enterprise of mimicry, not recreation!
People keep saying "this isn't AI, this still isn't AI" as if the engineers are claiming to have created life in a lab. That isn't what the goddamn word means.
This is artificial intelligence. It is simple, task-specific artificial intelligence, but that is covered by the definition.
I think it's obvious that computers will shortly be able to be any human player at virtually any kind of structured game. In fact, I have a hard time imaging a game where computers won't soon be able to beat a human.
Even unstructured games like Pictionary and Cards Against Humanity will eventually be able to be played well by computers (after enough training and live competition). Determining the "winner" of those games is subjective, but I've little doubt that computers will eventually be able to master them.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Now let's imagine : let two AlphaGo machines play each other Go games. More games. More time allowed... Folks : it becomes IMO so abysmal. Where will it stops ? I literally shiver in awe. I believe this could be radically extreme disruptive technology. Keep in mind, AlphaGo invented moves it never observed before. Keep in mind, it can learn quite some different games, just by being exposed to samples. Wooooooaaaaaa. Impressed, concerned, exited, I am. Z.
Go is an interesting game for this approach. It is thin, which mean that the moves and pieces are the same and don't do a lot. It is wide so calculating everything from scratch is essentially not doable...
Chess got to be good enough by essentially matching GM search depth, by intelligently narrowing the search tree. And either capitalizing or avoiding tactical issues, within that depth, and if there are no tactical issues if there are a collection of moves that are left, make the ones that follow a distinct set of priorities. But total search depth and search thinning have proved by far to be the most valuable of contributions. With intelligently managing the priorities a distant but important second.
Tic Tac Toe is done by being able to search to the game ending. As well as connect four.
Checkers is solved by being able to connect opening books with endgame table bases making the search limited enough to be doable by current computing power..
Go is interesting because the nature of the game is one of knowing the right moves to make in given positions. And the pieces on the board don't move. There are going to be two kinds of moves tactical calculating moves which can be iterated (And not as deeply as chess), and those that are correct based on "knowledge" without iterative proof. The best human players are going to be the ones that can do both and not just one. The trick is to first split up the two types of moves. And with the knowledge moves the AI mechanism essentially stole the knowledge from games by human players. And then tested and retested that knowledge by playing against itself. There is also some expertise in manipulating the games to handle board rotation, and location of plays depending on position of the plays in relation to the edge of the board. There is also the reactive vs active moves and when the board requires one type or another.
I am entirely unconvinced that this methodology is going to be universally useful at unknown problems. It has a high level of specialization that must be known by the program in advance to even get to the big data stealing of correct moves (knowledge). What will be useful is that the technique will be added to our knowledge of how to attack certain types of problems, and will help in creation of certain expert systems. What they have actually solved is how to play go as well as humans can, and very little more than that. And not all problems are going to be solvable this way, and even if the can, it is not always going to be the easiest, most elegant, or provide truth.
What is still not likely to be convincingly known is "truth". Chess and Go even beating the best human players still doesn't know the truth in every situation. It is believe that in Chess that the truth always leads to a "draw". In Go, it is believed that Black should always win. We are a long long away from demonstrating, much less proving either case. And may be impossible as the iterative requirement may be simply too high.
What will be interesting is when we can develop AI that can understand and break down a problem into it's meta components and rules, and discover knowledge by itself. You know like some humans seem to be able to do.
Lee Sedol is a loser, I like people who don't lose to supercomputers!
" Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind"- Orange Catholic Bible- Dune Series "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."[6]-God Emperor of Dune "Man may not be replaced."-The Butlerian Jihad a.k.a. The Great Revolt use of technology trains humans to think like machines. The problem is that machines are deterministic; thus, training people to be machines is self-limiting. Herbert seemed to think that to be human is to be essentially 'open-ended', capable of undiscovered, indeterminate evolution, both personally and as a species.- Heidegger's thesis.- Over to you human race.