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Google's AlphaGo AI Defeats the World's Best Human Go Player (engadget.com)
It isn't looking good for humanity. Google's AI AlphaGo on Tuesday defeated Ke Jie, the world's number one Go player, in the first game of a three-part match. The new win comes a year after AlphaGo beat Korean legend Lee Se-dol 4-1 in one of the most potent demonstrations of the power of AI to date. Adding insult to the injury, AlphaGo scored the victory over humanity's best candidate in China, the place where the abstract and intuitive board game was born. Engadget adds: After the match, Google's DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explained that this was how AlphaGo was programmed: to maximise its winning chances, rather than the winning margin. This latest iteration of the AI player, nicknamed Master, apparently uses 10 times less computational power than its predecessor that beat Lee Sedol, working from a single PC connected to Google's cloud server. [...] The AI player picked up a 10-15 point lead early on, which limited the possibilities for Jie to respond. Jie was occasionally winning during the flow of the match, but AlphaGo would soon reclaim the lead, ensuring that his human opponent had limited options to win as the game progressed.
Well, maybe it's no true Scotsman's intelligence. I don't know.
Same for the human player ...
Proof of artificial intelligence: A reasoning task that, once a computer is able to do it, is no longer considered to require artificial intelligence. See: chess, driving a car, natural language processing.
No true test of artificial intelligence can be solved by a computer.
Yes and no. Chess technically has 20 possible first moves (8 pawns 1 step, 8 pawns 2 steps, 2 ways to move each knight) but most of those are never seen. Just like Chess has common opening patterns, so does Go. In the case of Go, to say that there are 4 possible first moves would be generous. Until you play, the board is symmetrical - any 4-4 corner point is the same, and any 3-4 corner is the same as any 4-3 corner. So the plausible first moves are 4-4, 3-4, 3-3 if you really really want the corner, and maybe there's one other reasonable play (5-4 or 5-3?) Similarly, the opponent only has a few responses - the opponent should take a corner of their own, and probably has no more than 8 moves that are even remotely good.
After the first few moves, Go has Joseki, which are similar to Chess openings, but Joseki are local. A Joseki describes how two players, playing optimally, will play a certain corner or edge shape. So, a Go-playing AI isn't really considering 360 moves - it's considering a few possible Joseki responses to the opponent's last move, or a few possible Tenuki responses elsewhere on the board.
The entire universe is a game with a strict set of rules. We may not understand them all, but we know they exist and that there's even the possibility that different universes have different rules. If having a strict set of rules within which a thing operates precludes that thing from being considered "intelligent", then apparently humans aren't intelligent either. We're just components in a universe-sized quantum computer implementing algorithms that we don't understand, in much the same way that AlphaGo is implementing algorithms that it doesn't understand.
But that's not a particularly useful way to think about things most of the time, so we've instead accepted that we can refer to any of these sorts of complex algorithms that are capable of competing with human intelligence as "AI". Granted, AlphaGo is limited to the problem space for which it was designed, so it isn't a general purpose AI, but it is nonetheless still an AI.
Suggesting otherwise is just playing games with semantics, usually because you don't like the implications involved with accepting that we now have purpose-built algorithms that can displace the need for human intelligence in specific, complex tasks. Regardless of what you decide to call them, that's an awesome and terrifying fact.