Google Go-Playing A.I. Retires To Focus On Energy Conservation And Medicine (engadget.com)

After "narrowly" beating the world's top Go player, what's left for Google's AlphaGo AI? Engadget reports: Now that it has nothing left to prove, the AI is hanging up its boots and leaving the world of competitive Go behind. AlphaGo's developers from Google-owned DeepMind will now focus on creating advanced general algorithms to help scientists find elusive cures for diseases, conjure up a way to dramatically reduce energy consumption and invent new revolutionary materials. Before they leave Go behind completely, though, they plan to publish one more paper later this year to reveal how they tweaked the AI to prepare it for the matches against Ke Jie. They're also developing a tool that would show how AlphaGo would respond to a particular situation on the Go board with help from the world's number one player. While you'll have to wait a while for those two, you'll soon be able to watch 50 games AlphaGo played against itself when it was training
The first ten games that AlphaGo played against itself are already online. Shi Yue, 9 Dan Professional and World Champion, described them as "Like nothing I've ever seen before -- they're how I imagine games from far in the future." Google announced that this week's competition "has been the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive program. For that reason, the Future of Go Summit is our final match event with AlphaGo... We hope that the story of AlphaGo is just the beginning."

Comments

Re:Not enought balls for a rematch?

[Kjella]

It's just a calculating machine. It is weak AI. I used to tell people that it was not AI at all, but they got upset and argued, so now I just say it's not strong AI. No one can argue with that. It's not general intelligence.

That depends on how broad you define general intelligence, you can certainly generalize "weak AI" without giving it any "strong AI" properties of consciousness, self-awareness, introspection or defining its own goals, ethics and morality to MacGyver-like levels of intelligence where it understands the physical and chemical properties of objects and can combine them into Rube Goldberg-like contraptions to achieve some goal even with multiple layers of gathering the resources, creating the components, tools and equipment themselves. Basically a "game" where the rules are the laws of nature as we know them, with no other restraints on the "moves".

For example say the goal is to start a fire. You don't have to teach the weak AI any methods, just basic chemistry of combustion, friction, optics and so on, the nature of the environment and available resources (earth atmosphere, sunlight, tinder, wood, glass, flint etc.) and it could work out that a bow drill, flint and steel or a lens to concentrate sunlight all may be possible ways to start a fire. With volume maybe it'll want to build a match factory or maybe it'll find some entirely novel way. And you can keep going from there until it can build every modern commodity, basically everything humans have produced is within the realm of weak AI. It just won't understand what anything is or why it's doing it, only that it satisfies some goal parameter(s) someone has set for it.

But that's okay, I think we're generally better at describing the result we want than the process anyway. If I want (fried) bacon and eggs it doesn't mean I know anything about owning a pig farm or raising chickens. I describe what I want to a chef AI that decides he needs raw bacon and eggs to a shopping AI, who purchases it. A stocking AI decides they need more bacon and eggs, which sets off a purchase/transport AI to resupply the store, that sets off a slaughterhouse AI to demand more pigs, that demand triggers the pig production AI to build more pig houses, buy more pig feed and raise more piglets and so on. It's weak AI all the way down. None of these AIs need to really understand "bacon and eggs" to do anything useful.