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

No surprise, as it cannot perform anymore

[gweihir]

If it were to continue play, it would start to and then routinely be beaten by human players. And that would ruin the illusion carefully crafted by an unfair set-up. Hence in order to keep up the lie, it has to "retire". The fact of the matter here is that even a good, but not world-class player with an unconventional play-style can beat a master for a few times if said master does not know that unconventional style before and that is what happened here. By now there are just to many reference games out there for it to be able to keep it up.

The whole thing is an utterly meaningless stunt for the gullible. Or in other words: It is a shameless lie.

Re:Not enought balls for a rematch?

[gweihir]

The gullibility of some people it truly astonishing. The actual situation is exactly the reverse, namely it will start to get beaten routinely. That is the reason why it is "retiring" now, when the carefully crafted illusion of "intelligence" (a blatant lie) still holds.

Re:Not enought balls for a rematch?

[gweihir]

For Chess, you are right. But Go is not anywhere near that point. Incidentally, machines playing Chess are not "intelligent" by any reasonable definition of that word, and the same is true for machines playing Go. All they do is mindlessly executing a planning algorithm. Even the "learning" is anything but, as it is merely adjustment of statistical parameters. Most problems that require intelligence to solve are not accessible to these techniques. What we are instead finding out is that neither playing Chess nor playing Go actually _requires_ intelligence and that automated solutions can scale way beyond what a player using intelligence can scale to. We may find that out about a few other things as well.