Slashdot Mirror
Google AI AlphaGo Wins Again, Leaves Humans In the Dust (cnet.com)
Google's AlphaGo has defeated the world's best Go player in the second out of three games, scoring an overall win for the artificial intelligence algorithm in the fiendishly complex board game. CNET adds: The human gave it his all. "Incredible," wrote DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis on Twitter while the match was underway. "According to AlphaGo evaluations Ke Jie is playing perfectly at the moment." The match took place over a year after AlphaGo bested Lee Sedol, one of the world's top Go players, in four out of five matches in March 2016. It also beat European champion Fan Hui 5-0 in October 2015. The match was being played in China, the place where the abstract and intuitive board game was born. The government, however, isn't a big fan of letting its citizens know about the battle and has censored all the livestreams in the country.
Being able to read deeper than a human in go is insufficient. There are too many positions to calculate even close to all of them, and a given position is very difficult to determine who is even winning. The news this time is that AlphaGo is beating the player who is considered to be the best player in the world. This match in particular is like when Deep Blue beating Gary Kasparov. If you're wondering why it winning a second game against Ke Jie is news, it's because it sort of proves that the first game wasn't a fluke. If AlphaGo could only beat Ke Jie in 1 in 7 games, we wouldn't say that it is better than him. So that it is continuing to win is impressive.
Like your quoted text says: AlphaGo optimizes for the winning probability, not stone difference. A win is a win. If it wins 99% of its games with minimal differences, you could still say it leaves humans in the dust. Of course, we've only seen 2 games, so it's a bit too early to call that yet.
The computer's efficiency is still low, but will improve rapidly. It took a supercomputer to beat Kasparov, but now a smartphone could do it. This generation of AlphaGo is already running on hardware that's only 1/10th of the previous version.
Don't be fooled by humans ability to play Go.
Humans are capable of basic rudimentary communication.
Although humans aren't truly intelligent, their behavior can at times mislead you into believing they are. However humans simply don't have a complex enough brain to have real thoughts.
All leading experts agree that on the evolutionary scale, space flight is a pre-requisite to intelligence. Like many species, humans are incapable of flight. Humans can construct very rudimentary machines enabling them to achieve atmospheric or space flight. Having no natural ability to fly demonstrates a true lack of any real intelligence in humans.
Humans can be trained to do tricks in exchange for a reward. Almost all humans will do various tricks in exchange for money, travel or entertainment. Some humans can even be coaxed to perform scientific experiments, or even publish a new scientific theory in exchange for scientific knowledge or gadgets. Don't be fooled by this. Their inability to instantly master new languages is one of many obvious indicators that humans are not truly intelligent. Humans actually believe that they created the machines.
Give humans some raw materials of high quality, and they can construct things demonstrating a rudimentary ability to create order and structure. Their adaptability allows them to use a wide variety of building materials such as steel, wood, plastic and stone to make their own nests.
Well maintained humans are completely safe in society. They are commonly seen nowdays in public. They are generally not known to hurt or attack. Get them vaccinated. Keep your license up to date. It is good to have a tag on your human in case it gets lost.
Humans are content with very little. They are inexpensive to keep and maintain. Provide fresh food and water. Play with your human every day. A human will be perfectly happy with an old, nearly worn out, obsolete Intra Glactica Net connection. They aren't demanding. Bring your human a new high tech toy every day and they will always be very happy to see you and greet you with great affection.
Humans are great at watching over the living unit when you are gone. They are instantly house-trained, and can be left indoors. Treated well, a human can almost seem as if it could genuinely love you.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Here you go, they are working on it:
DeepMind has already begun working with the UK's national health service to develop apps and other tools for diagnosis.
In many games and sports the final score can be misleading. If you want to know how close it was you have to watch (and understand) the match.
In match 1 AlphaGo won by half a point, the smallest margin of victory possible, but it was not a close game. AlphaGo was leading since relatively early. It's AlphaGo style to "bleed" points away when its leading to make the game simpler, safer, and ultimately still win. AlphaGo is very good at calculating the would-be final score.
In match 2 well into the mid-game it was still dead even. Both players kept raising the stakes again and again, so when the bottom finally came off the difference in points was huge. Yet it was a very close match and a superb performance by Ke Jie.
In their calculation, a Chinese national got beat by an American AI machine. Now drop out "national" and "AI machine", that's all the Chinese censors needed to know.
Except that it isn't all they need to know... the fact that this computer beat the world's best Go player doesn't lessen the worth of the player or devalue China's reputation in the slightest. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the game of Go is sufficiently computable that it is possible to design software that will never lose to any human player. If the program can consistently beat the best player in the world, then its victories can probably be discounted as mere luck or caused by mistakes that the human player made, and the goal has been achieved. That the best player happens to be Chinese is superfluous to this, and while I understand that there can be some sense of national pride in a country having the world's best player at some sport or other event, this match doesn't even change that fact about their player. He is still the best player in the world, and until some other person beats him, that fact will remain. Politically, the outcome of this human vs computer match is actually entirely neutral, and I am greatly concerned that a government that would want to place such political significance on the results of a game such as this that they felt the need to censor it have a sufficiently misplaced set of priorities that will invariably be quite detrimental to their country.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The real intelligence isn't in the people playing the game, but the people who made the game in the first place. This is why AI is a misnomer here.
This new version of AlphaGo runs on a single machine, using Google's own Tensor Processing Units.
Not be just being faster, they wouldn't. Take a bad algorithm, and make it a million times faster, and it's still bad. A factor of a million in Go only gets you a few extra levels of depth, which is useless if you're still using the same bad evaluation of the board.
Maybe you should read about the technology of AlphaGo first before you make such a claim. It uses not just computing power but also a combination of fancy algorithms such as neural networks. Neural networks are motivated by our brain. And you have to admit that our brain is some physical device - it can be simulated to some point by a "searching and processing data" device.
"Kill" Go? No. Much like Deep Blue did with Chess, AlphaGo will bring a renaissance of innovative play to Go, and it has already started. Much conventional wisdom is being re-evaluated already in light of AlphaGo, and moves that were once considered "correct" in certain situations are already being reconsidered as sub-optimal.
AlphaGo's playing style seems similar to that of some great chessplayers:
Karpov: ... Karpov's "boa constrictor" playing style is solidly positional, taking no risks but reacting mercilessly to any tiny errors made by his opponents. As a result, he is often compared to his idol, the famous José Raúl Capablanca, the third World Champion. Karpov himself describes his style as follows:
...
Let us say the game may be continued in two ways: one of them is a beautiful tactical blow that gives rise to variations that don't yield to precise calculations; the other is clear positional pressure that leads to an endgame with microscopic chances of victory.... I would choose [the latter] without thinking twice. If the opponent offers keen play I don't object; but in such cases I get less satisfaction, even if I win, than from a game conducted according to all the rules of strategy with its ruthless logic.
Capablanca: ... Capablanca excelled in simple positions and endgames, and his positional judgment was outstanding, so much so that most attempts to attack him came to grief without any apparent defensive efforts on his part. However, he could play great tactical chess when necessary ... He was also capable of using aggressive tactical play to drive home a positional advantage, provided he considered it safe and the most efficient way to win, for example against Spielmann in the 1927 New York tournament. ...
or maybe Petrosian: Petrosian was a conservative, cautious, and highly defensive chess player who was strongly influenced by Aron Nimzowitsch's idea of prophylaxis. He made more effort to prevent his opponent's offensive capabilities than he did to make use of his own. He very rarely went on the offensive unless he felt his position was completely secure. He usually won by playing consistently until his aggressive opponent made a mistake, securing the win by capitalizing upon this mistake without revealing any weaknesses of his own. ... Petrosian was known for his use of the "positional exchange sacrifice", where one side sacrifices a rook for the opponent's bishop or knight. Kasparov discussed Petrosian's use of this motif: "Petrosian introduced the exchange sacrifice for the sake of 'quality of position', where the time factor, which is so important in the play of Alekhine and Tal, plays hardly any role. Even today, very few players can operate confidently at the board with such abstract concepts. Before Petrosian no one had studied this. By sacrificing the exchange 'just like that', for certain long term advantages, in positions with disrupted material balance, he discovered latent resources that few were capable of seeing and properly evaluating."