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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."

18 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Dead Game by Gabest · · Score: 2

    He's going to stream League of Legends in the future.

  2. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Informative

    At least IBM had the balls to go again.

    I don't think Ke Jie has the balls to do it again. It would be utterly pointless too, because the AI will keep improving much quicker than human players.

    “I feel like his game is more and more like the ‘Go god’. Really, it is brilliant,” he said.
    Ke vowed never again to subject himself to the “horrible experience”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/te...

  3. Re:Energy conservation? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are you stupid? They used their AI to cut the energy consumption in their data centers by 40% (!!!). And that was almost a year ago. If it did something similar to the grid, it would save $124 BILLION in electricity each year in the US alone.

  4. All 50 self-playing games have been released by religionofpeas · · Score: 3, Informative

    https://twitter.com/DeepMindAI...

    We decided to publish the remaining #AlphaGo self-play games in one go. We hope players around the world enjoy them!

    https://deepmind.com/research/...

  5. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by jlowery · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I agree about the gullibility of some people, just disagree about who we are talking about.

    The best chess AI programs are already rated 200+ points above the top-ranked human players. No master today disputes that a machine would kick their ass, even though masters train *daily* against AI programs.

    Bill Gates recently acknowledged that their are different kinds of intelligence. We are starting to see how machine intelligence is of a kind we don't understand and won't match. How long we can keep an edge in other types of intelligence is the only point left to debate.

    --
    If you post it, they will read.
  6. Re:No surprise, as it cannot perform anymore by Nova77 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wow, way to talk without knowing a thing about it.

    AlphaGo managed to beat one of the best player in recent history (Lee Sedol) last year, then went on a 60-0 strike against the highest ranked professionals. Now he won a tournament with the world champion without ever showing a weakness. The experts were pretty much anonymous that he never had a chance at this point.

    DeepMind have already published the details of the algorithm in a Nature paper and will do the same with the recent improvements later this year. I guess if you're right nobody will be able to reproduce the results...

  7. Re: Energy conservation? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

    You think they will let that happen?

    Who is "they"? If you mean the corps that profit from selling electricity, it is likely that they would be more profitable with greater efficiency. Most electricity is sold at fixed prices, and power companies run "peakers" at a loss. So if more intelligent energy use smooths out the peaks and troughs, the peaker plants can be idled, cheap base power will cover more of the load, and their profits will go up.

  8. Re:No surprise, as it cannot perform anymore by PlusFiveTroll · · Score: 2

    gweihir is Zap Brannigan

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  9. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

    Intelligence according to a dictionary definition is "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". Surely the machine is doing that, and so are Chess computers.

    But Go is not anywhere near that point

    Right now, it's already beyond the point where it can beat any human. And we've only just started. It's already stronger than Deep Blue was when it beat Kasparov. People also cried when IBM retired Deep Blue, but by today's standards, Deep Blue is a mediocre program. The same will happen with Go.

  10. Re: Not enought balls for a rematch? by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

    Google makes a grave mistake by not making AlphaGo available on Go servers against which the public can train to get better.

    It doesn't matter. The real contributions are the ideas and techniques, which will be described in a paper. Other people will take it from here.

    Doubt about AlphaGo being a fluke can be debunked by making it available to the public.

    If you're not already convinced by the 60-0 victory, and the 3-0 victory, you're not going to be convinced by further games.

  11. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

    Or would you claim a book can be "intelligent"?

    AlphaGo has encapsulated knowledge about good and bad Go positions, and can apply that knowledge, not only in identical situations, but also in completely novel situations that resemble similar patterns.

    Can you point me to a book that can apply the knowledge contained in it ?

  12. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by religionofpeas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    f you want to understand the issue, you need to understand the difference between weak and strong AI.

    I know the difference, but weak AI still has an "I" in it. Intelligence is a broad and fuzzy concept, with many different elements. The computer can now capture some of these elements, just like a chicken or a dog can capture some, and in a growing number of cases, the computer can do it better than us. Obviously, we're not even close to making a computer that can capture the full range, but I don't believe there's a fundamental gap, just like there's no fundamental gap between a chicken and a human brain.

  13. Re:No surprise, as it cannot perform anymore by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 2

    Yea! And it's not really A.I. any more either now that a computer has done it.

    And the sun got in his eyes.

    Let me join your "humans bitter against computers" club too!

    --
    She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
  14. Re:hmm by religionofpeas · · Score: 3

    You must not be familiar with the search space that Go has, compared to the processing speed of computers.

    AES-256 is also a set of rules. Are you surprised that computers can't break it ?

  15. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

    I know the difference, but weak AI still has an "I" in it.

    Obviously you didn't understand what you read. There is a fundamental gap between AlphaGo and Chicken brain, much greater than between a human and a cockroach.

    I tried to give you clues, but you closed your mind and continue to spout nonsense because of your lack of understanding.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  16. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by religionofpeas · · Score: 2

    I tried to give you clues, but you closed your mind and continue to spout nonsense because of your lack of understanding.

    I'm afraid you're a victim of the Dunning Kruger effect.

  17. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by Kjella · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  18. Re:Not enought balls for a rematch? by ayesnymous · · Score: 2

    Not 'we' as in the slashdot collective.