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Google's AlphaGo AI Secretively Won More Than 50 Straight Games Against World's Top Go Players (qz.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the don't-tell-anyone dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: When Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo made history by taking down Korea's Lee Sedol -- one of the world's best Go players -- in a landslide 4-1 victory in March, Chinese player Ke Jie was skeptical. He famously wrote on Weibo the next day, "Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Sedol, it can't beat me," and has since agreed to take on the AI at an undecided time. But now even Ke, the reigning top-ranked Go player, has acknowledged that human beings are no match for robots in the complex board game, after he lost three games to an AI that mysteriously popped up online in recent days. The AI turned out to be AlphaGo in disguise. On Jan. 4, after winning more than 50 games against several of the world's best Go players, Ke included, a user registered with an ID of "Master" on two Chinese board game platforms came forward to identify itself as AlphaGo. "I'm AlphaGo's Doctor Huang," the user "Master" wrote on foxwq.com, according to screenshots from Chinese media reports. Taiwanese developer Aja Huang is a member of Google's DeepMind team behind the AI. Since Dec. 29, Master has defeated a long list of top Go players including Korea's Park Jung-hwan (world No. 3), Japan's Iyama Yuta (No. 5) and Ke in fast-paced games. He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie. By Jan. 4 when the test was completed, Master had racked up 60 wins, plus the one tie, and zero loss, according to numerous reports (link in Chinese).

74 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. When will google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    When will Google make an AlphaMale AI/robot?

    1. Re:When will google by Falos · · Score: 1

      This is about as insightful as Sturgeon's Law, aka observation of the definitions of words.

      Then again, it's a Thing because we admittedly don't always realize it.

  2. Wargames much? by Kjella · · Score: 5, Funny

    He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie.

    So the only way to win is not to play.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Wargames much? by PseudoThink · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Star Trek TNG depicted nearly this exact scenario back in July, 1989, with Episode 21 of Season 2, entitled "Peak Performance":
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIRT6xRQkf8

    2. Re:Wargames much? by kelemvor4 · · Score: 2

      He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie.

      So the only way to win is not to play.

      Meh, gamers ragequit when losing online games all the time. Nothing spectacular here.

    3. Re:Wargames much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      For Tic Tac Toe and Global Thermonuclear War, that is the correct approach.

    4. Re:Wargames much? by JoeMerchant · · Score: 1

      He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie.

      So the only way to win is not to play.

      No. The only way to not lose is to quit before you are beaten.

      Resistance is futile, winning is not an option.

    5. Re:Wargames much? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Funny

      For Tic Tac Toe and Global Thermonuclear War, that is the correct approach.

      Years ago, in NYC's Chinatown, there was a chicken that could play tic-tac-toe. You pay $2, and you can play against the chicken. I watched it pay a dozen times, it would always win or draw. When my turn came, I played, and it was a draw. They my cousin played, and lost. As we were walking away, I say "Dude, you just lost to chicken." He was quiet for a bit, and then said, "Yeah, but the chicken got to go first." Me: "Yeah, but still, it was a chicken." Him: "Well, yeah, but the chicken plays everyday. I was rusty." Me: "Yeah, but it was A CHICKEN. You are a HUMAN. Shouldn't that count for something?" Years later, I still rib him about it every time we meet. He definitely wishes he had chosen not to play.

       

    6. Re:Wargames much? by John.Banister · · Score: 1

      Me: "Yeah, but it was A CHICKEN. You are a HUMAN. Shouldn't that count for something?"

      Learn the answer at any Chinese restaurant.

    7. Re:Wargames much? by sexconker · · Score: 1

      AlphaGo is a parallel search algorithm, not an AI.

    8. Re:Wargames much? by dlingman · · Score: 1

      There was a home electronic game based on that exact scenario - "I took a lickin' from a chicken". Had a goofy looking robot chicken in a clear box, with inputs that would let it kick your ass a several games.

    9. Re:Wargames much? by Dagger2 · · Score: 2

      And here we have a textbook example of the AI effect.

      It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'.

    10. Re: Wargames much? by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Something that can learn new things on its own, for a start. You can't take AlphaGo and teach it to play backgammon without reprogramming it, for example.

    11. Re:Wargames much? by Megane · · Score: 1

      I'll wait for General Tso's answer.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    12. Re:Wargames much? by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      "I took a lickin' from a chicken".

      Yeuchh! Oral service from an avian dinosaur. Between the idea of having my pecker pecked and Rule 34 of the Internet, I think I need my brain scrubbed with lye.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
    13. Re:Wargames much? by RatchetDriver · · Score: 1

      Deer, not deers, is the plural of deer.
      Sorry, I couldn't stop myself...

      --
      Nothing to see here. Move along.
  3. AI Go Players? by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 2

    I'm waiting for the AI Rust players.

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    1. Re:AI Go Players? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't the ability to have perfect accuracy and millisecond response times give the AI a huge advantage in almost any conflict once it managed to get a gun?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re: AI Go Players? by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 1

      Have you never seen any scifi movie?

  4. MCP by JonathanMurray8253 · · Score: 2

    Don't forget; the Master Control Program started off as a chess program. Remember Encom!

  5. It's official by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 4, Informative

    An official confirmation from Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of DeepMind.

    1. Re:It's official by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 5, Informative

      While we are at it, here's all 60 games in the SGF format.

  6. Hey smart guy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Why aren't you building flying cars yet?

  7. Ok for the next trick by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'll be impressed when you write an AI that can competently play Civ5.

    I'm not really sure if it's a more difficult problem than Go or not (I'd think so with all of the decisions to be made), but holy hell is the shipped AI in all Civ games useless.

    1. Re:Ok for the next trick by es330td · · Score: 2

      I think the problem with Civ et al AI is that the individual PC doesn't have the horsepower to be a competent opponent. Given a webapi to Google AI I imagine developers could create games that are effectively unbeatable by humans.

    2. Re:Ok for the next trick by psycho12345 · · Score: 1

      They are already attempting something just as hard, they will be learning how to play Starcraft 2 competently

    3. Re:Ok for the next trick by Falos · · Score: 1

      You call it "sad", I call it the next twitch fad of the month. Hey, let's not integrate it, have it output to a physical robot that presses keys. It's painfully circuitous, yet that's the sort of circus act and personality that attracts eyeballs. Dress it up like Johnny Five or some shit.

      Wait, no, let's do integrate it, and write up a box for it, so you can sell the program to players!

      Now you have something to call sad: People who use a bot to win their games. It's not really "theirs" anymore, is it now?

      Anyway, time to ask if they'll loan me their deeplearning so I can attract buyers to my "perfect-playing, google-AI Hearthstone trainer".

    4. Re:Ok for the next trick by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'll be impressed when you write an AI that can competently play Civ5.

      Knowingly or not, you actually wrote a very legitimate (and probably harder) problem in AI. How do you make a good AI opponent? Note this is a different question than what was done in Go recently, which is "make a computer program as skilled as possible."

      You need to make an AI which will make mistakes, pretend like it doesn't know everything about the universe, including the player's civilization state (see The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard trope and related tropes within that article), have multiple civilizations acting independently of each other, be "good" enough to provide a challenge but not good enough to be unbeatable, act "realistically" given the supposed limited information it has, etc...

      Making an unbeatable AI in a game in many ways is easier than making a good AI opponent. As a thought experiment, consider the game tic-tac-toe. I'm sure I could make an unbeatable AI pretty easily... but I don't think I could make an AI which was hard-yet-beatable, especially if somebody would be playing against it dozens of times so I couldn't just hard-code moves.

    5. Re:Ok for the next trick by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Writing an AI for many games is very, very hard if you make it fair.

      It should only know the game state to the same extent as a human player would.
      Even with infinite APM and math skills, it's no easy task.

    6. Re:Ok for the next trick by sexconker · · Score: 1

      SC2 is a joke. Small map? Zerg rush kekeke. AI with insane APM to micro will always win that. Medium to large map? Protoss Stalker ball (again, with micro) to Void Rays.

      The reason the SC2 competitive scene hasn't taken off is the game is fundamentally shitty. It's a rock-paper-scissors game 90% of the time, and Blizzard balances it not for fairness but for a desired outcome (equal win/loss rates across all races at higher levels of play). This was a HUGE problem during the initial release because all Blizzard ever did was nerf Terran. Players were better with Terran because the first campaign was Terran. When HotS came out, they nerfed Zerg a bit (but also nerfed Terran). Now that LotV is out, they've nerfed Protoss a bit (but again, fuck Terran).

      Overall game design was geared toward fast ("exciting") 1v1 ("competitive") matches. And compared to BW no one gives a shit. Because it's boring as fuck, they can't balance it fairly, people want to play in teams and the game simply doesn't work beyond 2v2 (which itself is a crapshoot). My friends and I used to play as 4 vs. others and we never lost a single game. One friend quit the game over it because it was so fucking broken. Instead, Blizzard is focusing on HotS (the MOBA, not the SC2 expo) and Overwatch.

      While they've got these games set up properly for team play, which is what people want instead of the boring, stale, simplistic 1v1 trash that is the SC2 "competitive scene", they still can't balance anything worth shit. Why is McCree sniping with a revolver? Why is Symmetra's shield generator completely OP? Why do they release broken heroes like Samuro? Because they want to tweak player numbers for each of those characters in Overwatch to reach some sort of diversity goal or some shit. For HotS, they sell new heroes for money (or in game currency, if you've been hoarding it), so they typically release them in an overpowered as fuck state, then tweak them to achieve the desired win/loss ratio.

      It all results in the abortion that is "Blizzard Balance". You may remember it from such films as "Nerf Terran, Buff Zerg" and "There is no Matchmaking Algorithm".

    7. Re:Ok for the next trick by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      SC2 is a joke. Small map? Zerg rush kekeke

      Hits a wall, then dies.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:Ok for the next trick by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      And compared to BW no one gives a shit. Because it's boring as fuck, they can't balance it fairly,

      SC2 is such a great game right now. It long ago surpassed BW in terms of potential strategies, balance, and general fun.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  8. But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This is not AI, simply because the rules of Go were programmed into the computer to start with. If it had to figure out the rules and the idea of winning by itself then that would be amazing...

    However it was taught what a good move is by some point or similar system, that's hardly self learning....

    1. Re:But... by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      I've always thought poker would be a better test for AI. Not in a card counting way, the computer would have to be forbidden from card counting since it is illegal to play the game that way. The computer instead would have to study the other players through a camera and understand what their tells are, and whether they are bluffing or not. Basically any game where the psychology of the other players matters as much as the rules of the game would be a better test.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    2. Re:But... by haruchai · · Score: 2

      This is not AI, simply because the rules of Go were programmed into the computer to start with. If it had to figure out the rules and the idea of winning by itself then that would be amazing...

      However it was taught what a good move is by some point or similar system, that's hardly self learning....

      Are you kidding? Then only a very small %age of humanity could be considered intelligent as there are a lot of things that a vanishingly small number of children would NEVER figure out without help.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    3. Re: But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You are actually wrong. AlphaGo was deep learning and evolved from playing all these pros. Thats why it cant be outsmarted using unconventional moves. There is minimal preprogramming involved.

    4. Re:But... by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      This just emphasizes my point. Understanding human behavior is the ultimate goal of AI. You can't 'be like' a human if you don't understand human behavior. Take for example the Google car that turned into a bus. If it understood human behavior and the world in general then it would have understood that you can't just turn in front of a 1 ton vehicle carrying people who would possibly get injured if the bus stopped suddenly.

      AI won't be able to drive cars in a safe way until it understands why the humans drive the way they do, because understanding is the only thing that will make it fully compatible with human drivers on public roads and not do unexpected things. This is an impressive harnessing of powerful computation for sure but it is not real intelligence.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    5. Re:But... by Frans+Faase · · Score: 2

      It is indeed true that one neural network was trained using a collection of games, but the version of AlphaGo that played against Lee Sedol last year, was using two neural networks, and the second one (for evaluating the positional strength of a board configuration) was trained by letting AlphaGo play against itself. It is not known how he current version of AlphaGo works, whether any additional neural networks were added, but if it has become stronger, it has done so by playing against itself. It should be noted that this latest version of AlphaGo was playing some surprising moves that made some people believe, it could not have been AlphaGo, or that it was a version that was trained without using a collection of games. It should be noted that DeepMind announced it wanted to experiment with training a neural network with zero additional knowledge for the game of go, just like they did with the neural networks playing old video games.

    6. Re:But... by Enigma2175 · · Score: 1

      there is nothing illegal about counting cards in poker, as it has no effect on the game. Try it in Blackjack on the other hand...

      There's nothing illegal about counting cards in blackjack either, although multi-deck shoes and continuous shuffle machines have largely made it irrelevant. In the old one-deck days, if the casino noticed you counting (or just winning too much) they would just "ask" you to leave.

      --

      Enigma

    7. Re: But... by sexconker · · Score: 1

      "Deep Learning" is a buzzword. It's a search algorithm or a trained neural net (that is implementing a search algorithm). How do I know? Because it's effective at playing Go. Go is an incredibly simple game with a massive search space. And it was absolutely programmed with the rules of the game, the win/loss conditions, etc., or at least explicitly trained on them in its bootstrapping phase.

      If you can't take AlphaGo and teach it to play Parcheesi in an hour without adjusting its code, is it really (or even artificially) "intelligent"? (No, it is not.)

    8. Re:But... by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      You're looking at it the wrong way. The fact of the matter is, AlphaGo can do one thing in it's life, play Go. Make an exhaustive list of the things in life a preschooler may be capable of (identify a color, identify an animal, read a book) and quickly the preschooler looks vastly more intelligent. If a person was born that could do nothing but beat everyone at Go, they wouldn't call him/her intelligent, they would call them a 'savant'. They used to be called 'idiot savants' but, political correctness..

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    9. Re:But... by haruchai · · Score: 1

      You're looking at it the wrong way. The fact of the matter is, AlphaGo can do one thing in it's life, play Go. Make an exhaustive list of the things in life a preschooler may be capable of (identify a color, identify an animal, read a book) and quickly the preschooler looks vastly more intelligent. If a person was born that could do nothing but beat everyone at Go, they wouldn't call him/her intelligent, they would call them a 'savant'. They used to be called 'idiot savants' but, political correctness..

      The advantage I give to humans is that a single gifted, well-honed human brain is still capable of besting just about any single-machine AI at many difficult tasks.
      AlphaGo, otoh, is running on hundreds of CPUs & GPUs.
      But as far as the savant argument goes, I don't think we'll hold the high ground for very long, perhaps a decade or so and we'll see AIs that are multi-talented.
      The real issue is not what they're capable of but who they can replace. A few companies are now looking to offload many middle management decisions onto machine decision making.
      I suppose the argument can be made that humans will simply find other things to do but so much of what we do now is either manual labor or simple enough to automate that I have to wonder exactly what billions of aging homo sapiens will do instead.

      --
      Pain is merely failure leaving the body
    10. Re: But... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Neural nets don't implement search algorithms ...

      'Artificial Intelligence' is a term like 'Autism' ... it has a well defined meaning for the people working in those fields. And laymen like you are ignorant about that meaning and try to impose what you think it should mean on your readership ;D

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    11. Re: But... by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Neural nets can implement just about anything they're trained to. It won't necessarily be the best or most accurate (it can easily fall into a local min/max issue until it's trained on data that bumps it out) but it generally works if you give it simple rules and goals, then let it train. A "search algorithm" here refers to a decision tree for making moves.

    12. Re: But... by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      A neural network is not able to analyze a decision tree. Hence it is not a search algorithm etc.
      It is a very 'simple' input pattern versus output pattern matcher/generator.

      The 'not so simple' task is to find a fitting topology (how many layers etc.) and to train efficiently and successful.
       

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    13. Re:But... by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      Perhaps AIs will become multi-talented or have some intuition about the world, but I believe approaches like AlphaGo will not tend to be expanded into a multipurpose AIs. AlphaGo is too much like a drag car designed to drive a 1/4 mile as fast as possible. The only way to get to a daily driver car is to scrap everything and start with a different approach.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    14. Re:But... by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      Basically any game where the psychology of the other players matters as much as the rules of the game would be a better test.

      That's a completely different class of game. Literally, a completely different class.

      Psychology essentially means having some game-relevant information which some players know and others don't. At least some players (probably all - I've never been interested to learn how to play poker beyond what's necessary for answering statistics problems) only have partial information on the state of the game. By contrast, in a game of Go the two players both have access to all of the information on the state of the game at all times. There is absolutely no hidden information. (*)

      Since the internet (or at least, my web browsing, before I started using ad-blockers) is full of adverts for online poker games, I assume that it's not actually against the rules of the game to use some technical fix (a face-obscuring mask ; or being on the other side of the world, competing through a computer ; botox ; whatever) to obscure the psychological "tells." At which point, definitely some information in the game - such as the cards in your hand - is definitely not shared with all the other players in the game at all times during the game.

      Go is a game of "perfect information" ; poker isn't. Comparing strategies for playing the two types is like comparing a word processor and a microwave oven. They're different things.

      (*) That includes the sequence of moves made. In the same way, a poker player knows which cards have been shown since the last shuffle, but different rule-sets for poker probably differ on whether all players get to see the cards in discarded hands.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
    15. Re:But... by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      Right, so what I'm saying is that it's not really interesting to see a computer play Go because the computer already has all the information it needs and is just a matter of doing a deep calculation on it. No different then pressing buttons on a calculator because the math in the calculator is already known. A more interesting application of AI is where it must build its cache of information about the world and make decisions based on it successfully. In fact I propose the former isn't really AI, just a hard calculation that is so complex it looks like human thinking. But because everything was already known it isn't "really" human thinking, therefore not AI.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    16. Re: But... by EllisDees · · Score: 1

      You mean, something like this?

      --
      -- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
  9. Typical by TFlan91 · · Score: 1

    "He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie."

    Typical rage quit after getting rekt, ruining the game for everyone involved.

    1. Re:Typical by Frans+Faase · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You seemed have to missed the fact that many of the top professional players were lining up to play against this bot. They view it as free training lession, not to beat an AI bot, but to beat their human counter parts. Since Lee Sedol played against AlphaGo, he has gained in strength, so much even that a certain point, using a certain method, AlphaGo was the strongest player, not because it had played more games, but because Lee Sedol had won so many games. Ke Jie, to be considered the strongest player at the moment, has made remarks that humans have only touched at the truth behind go, after he played against Master(P). Most go players have a very high regard for the game, as they sense that it is much deeper than human mind can consider. For this reason, I guess, many professional go players find this a very exicting time, because it will enhance their understanding of the game. In this view it is very unlikely that a professional player will use a trick to force a tie.

    2. Re:Typical by Yosho · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Go games typically end in a resignation, actually. Even decent players can tell when they're going to lose, and playing to the end when it's obvious you're going to lose is considered very rude.

      --
      Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
  10. Rise of the Machines by mentil · · Score: 1

    There was some question of if it was a fluke against Sedol, now it's confirmed that machine has bested man at Go. First Chess, now Go. I'm wondering where the goalposts will be moved to now.

    I can imagine some kind of Turing test where a woman converses with two suitors, and has to choose which to go on a date with; one is a man, the other a machine (cue the jokes). Lines of dialogue used to have to be pre-programmed, but with all the deep learning that modern AI can do, with access to project gutenberg/wikipedia/etc. it can certainly adlib believable and consistent dialogue. Traditional Turing tests tend to be 'won' by machines when the human is too much of a jerk, or when the machine is indistinguishable from a developmentally-challenged human; have a suave man (e.g. amateur standup comedian) competing against a machine that can't get away with pretending to be an idiot, and you'll have a more intriguing competition.

    Next step: make an AI that can automatically shut down trolls and fools with citations and deconstructions of illogical statements, and deploy it on every forum and comment section. Please.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    1. Re:Rise of the Machines by Fwipp · · Score: 1

      Have you listened to men? ELIZA would win that test.

    2. Re:Rise of the Machines by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Ok, time to increase the board size to 37x37.

      Let's be honest. It's quite an achievement. But the last stand against AI should continue to stand.

      In fact when chess fell to AI we learned nothing about AI, but when go effectively fell last year we had learned something from it. The play looks like human play because it's playing like a human.

    3. Re:Rise of the Machines by umghhh · · Score: 1

      This test is useless - most designers of the machines are hetero men thus they would have chosen a girl for tests as in this movie.

      The there is this other thing - in our quest to improve our lot we went on to improve all other things too with economic efficiency being the best factor to decide what is better. Now what would be the final logical conclusion of a system that was set to improve that to the maximum possible value?

    4. Re:Rise of the Machines by fmoliveira · · Score: 1

      Before that there will be an AI scammer, that will be very convincing in make you give some money to it

    5. Re:Rise of the Machines by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      There was some question of if it was a fluke against Sedol,

      Not from Sedol. No other opinion matters.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
    6. Re:Rise of the Machines by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      Ok, time to increase the board size to 37x37.

      People have been playing with different (larger) sized boards for decades if not centuries (ISTR that some Japanese professionals were studying 21x21 games in the 18th century ; 20x20 was considered a solution to the "mirror go" problem in the 15/ 16th century, until more elegant solutions were developed). The high-dan players who have worked on larger boards say the balance of the game between territory and influence changes considerably.

      37x37 would be an unnecessary extension in size unless you're one of those people who think that "more is better". Consider the common sizes of board in use already : 5x5 has only ever been used for the most basic of teaching games and was completely evaluated for optimal play by hand in about 1990 ; 9x9 is the norm for teaching once you get beyond the rankest of beginners (in the mid-20s of kyu - a few hours of teaching) ; 13x13 is a popular size for quick games between the rounds of a tournament ; and 19x19 has been the "serious" size since around 800 BCE. People have been experimenting with 21x21 and 23x23 for centuries, but neither have ever become popular, suggesting that human exploration of 19x19 is far from complete.

      you might find these Sensei's Library pages interesting : Interesting board sizes ; Different Sized Boards ; Large Boards (an interesting speculation, with grounding : "Go boards and stones were often used in fortune telling. The connection between 361 intersections and 365 days is important. " ; also some specific comments on 37x37 play). And for entertainment value, Unusual Gobans. Go players have been looking at variations to the rule sets for a long time.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  11. So just anybody... by moosehooey · · Score: 1

    So just any anonymous doofus can go on a website and play against the world's top players? Interesting...

    1. Re:So just anybody... by ffkom · · Score: 1

      I would assume their AI had to play numerous games against increasingly strong online players before those top players were offered as opponents by the online service.

    2. Re:So just anybody... by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      It's a pretty safe bet that the AlphaGo team has some pretty good players onboard who could seed the stealth account with some high-ranking initial opposition to establish it's strength. After that, something that shows up as a confirmed 7 or 8 dan professional would pretty soon attract more ranked opponents. If they didn't want to wade through the low ranked people, then you can set tthe minimum rank for possible opponents - or at least you could the last time I played go online (8 or 10 years ago).

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  12. Hubris of man, down to the last individual by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    He knew Sedol was beaten yet had the hubris to say, "Even if AlphaGo can defeat Lee Sedol, it can't beat me". Actually sounds like a lot of posters here, "AI will never take my job"

  13. Pride goeth before a fall by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As we see yet another instance of hubris in action, this time the assertion of Go players and hangers-on that "Go is so much more complex than chess, so it will never be mastered by a machine". Computational complexity or large problem space has little to do with either play-ability or ease of mastery.
    Next challenge?

    1. Re:Pride goeth before a fall by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 1

      It wasn't hubris, and yes, go is much more complex than chess. People didn't overestimate the game, they just underestimated how fast AI techniques would advance.They thought this would come in the 2020's not 2016.

    2. Re:Pride goeth before a fall by Herve5 · · Score: 1

      (...) "Go is so much more complex than chess, so it will never be mastered by a machine".

      I am not this old, but I *perfectly* remember having owned a book on computing that addressed the same topic 30 years ago with the previous-level example: "tick-tac-toe is lost to the AI but chess is so much more complex, so it will never be mastered..." :-)

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      Herve S.
    3. Re:Pride goeth before a fall by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      the assertion of Go players and hangers-on that "Go is so much more complex than chess, so it will never be mastered by a machine".

      Having been playing Go for 33 years now, and knowing people who've been trying to program Go for 32 years, I've never heard either a player or "hanger-on" make that assertion. Even in the days when the best program in the world could be beaten flat by a human with a couple of evening's teaching.

      Come to think of it, I've never met a "Go hanger-on" who was not also to some degree a player. No, sorry - I tell a lie. There was one guy whose wife was brain-damaged ; she didn't play, but enjoyed the company at tournaments.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  14. At least by monkease · · Score: 1

    ...humans are still better at making up games :)

  15. 60 wins 0 loss by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 1

    that AlphaGo is so lucky!

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    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  16. the significance of Go by epine · · Score: 1

    After chess, checkers, poker, and Arimaa fell, the significance of Go with its huge search space was whether its huge search space and geometrical intuition represented a fundamentally harder challenge for computer algorithms, or just a different challenge, one that we hadn't figured out yet.

    Many were saying that Go posed a fundamentally harder problem than chess. I took the view that Go would fall hard once it finally fell, but it was unclear when that day would arrive. I thought it was more "different" rather than "more difficult".

    My view came more from game theory than intuition, because I'm not a Go player.

    What we now know is that people reasoning from intuition about what kinds of closed, artificial problems computers are good/bad at are not to be trusted.

    Brute force comes in many flavours.

  17. Resistance... by xtsigs · · Score: 1

    ... is futile.

  18. It always leads the way by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 1

    AI does better than humans in chess, Jeopardy, soon driving and surgery, and now Go? Come on, man, put this "better than humans can do" power to real work and build a sexbot that can fuck the holy hell out of me!

    Don't mod this down! You know you want this.

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    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    1. Re:It always leads the way by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      It's not the AI that lets sexbots down. It's the ... firm-but-somewhat-squishy-ware.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  19. I'll say it by dingleberrie · · Score: 1

    Now do it on about 20 Watts while still having the robustness and flexibility of a human brain.
    Let's not lose sight of how beating someone in a complex task doesn't equate to what humans intelligence.

    Don't get me wrong, though, this is an impressive point we've reached in technology.