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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.
The real question is: when two identically trained systems compete against each other, what are the underlying mechanisms of competition leading to one winning?
Go. By a very, very, very, very, very large margin.
It isn't looking good for humanity.
Purpose built machines have been able to, or be used to out do humans for a very long time. A lever can be used to lift more weight than a person alone can. But we're not being ruled by sticks. Cranes can lift even more.
Cars are used to move people further and faster than they could on their own. Computers can do many more calculations per second. These things make life better for humanity as a whole.
Unless AlphaGo figures out a way to keep a person from unplugging it, I'm guessing that humanity will be just fine.
I think you miss the point. Due to the complexity of Go in the sense that any turn can be played on dozens if not hundreds of spaces, computers could not brute force their way to victory. The reason this is important is because A: it shows a computer using something other than brute force to solve a logistical problem, and B: the program has the ability to be self taught beyond learning the basic rules (and rule sets don't get much more basic than Go). Yes, a computer beat a human, but this is a much different victory than winning at chess.
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.
Why doesn't Google actually apply this to solve some REAL world problems, huh?
Such as "why does Google's leadership seem to have the attention span of a puppy overdosed on Adderall?"
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Not only that; heuristics are horribly complicated in Go. For example, it is possible to score moves in Chess simply by assigning value to pieces and evaluatiing the current state of the board. On Go a seemingly innocuous early in the game can be decisive in determining a match later on.
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.
I'll be impressed when a computer wins Hungry Hippos, that game is obviously rigged towards anyone younger than 7. My kid beats me in it all the time.
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Thank you for that explanation, which is helpful and has some points I hadn't considered. But I do still wonder if whoever said "meh" isn't partly right too. Is this really an AI kind of approach? Different than how computers win at chess, yes, but is it really AI? The whole reason that chess was an AI problem for computers to solve was that early on people thought that to beat humans you'd have to learn how to think. That ended up being wrong. Computers playing chess against humans now is unfair because the computers are basically taking an open book test against humans who have to memorize and think and can't consult an open book. I guess it's impressive for Google in that they aren't doing brute force but are they still doing lookups? Is trying to maximize winning chances really nothing more than limiting which "book" the program consults?
Alpha go is trained by reinforcement learning, like a person would be. They let it watch some historical games until it gets the basics, then it plays itself to refine its game.
It's debatable whether chess is a simpler game or not, but chess can be effectively played with standard look ahead and tree pruning techniques. Those work poorly in go. The reinforcement learning used for alpha go could be used to teach it to be an unbeatable chess player too. And originated with deep mind for teaching the computer to play Nintendo games. Any Nintendo game.
One of the neat things about reinforcement learning is that you define the outcome you want (highest score, winning the most games) and what inputs are allowed (placing a stone, pressing buttons on a controller) and that's it.
Sure, when computers define what artificial intelligence is, then computers can be artificially intelligent.
Considering Consciousness doesn't exist according to Science how do you measure something that Scientists are completely clueless about?
Actual Intelligence (a.i.) is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (i.e. Matter behaves like a Particle, Matter behaves like a Wave) and reason about a way to resolve the paradox by coming to a third, higher perspective.
Artificial Ignorance (A.I) is nothing more then a glorified table lookup.
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The number of religions on a species' home planet is the fastest way to tell how advanced the species is. 1 == Advanced. >1 == Primitive.