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DeepMind's Go-Playing AI Doesn't Need Human Help To Beat Us Anymore (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the human-free dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind has unveiled the latest version of its Go-playing software, AlphaGo Zero. The new program is a significantly better player than the version that beat the game's world champion earlier this year, but, more importantly, it's also entirely self-taught. DeepMind says this means the company is one step closer to creating general purpose algorithms that can intelligently tackle some of the hardest problems in science, from designing new drugs to more accurately modeling the effects of climate change. The original AlphaGo demonstrated superhuman Go-playing ability, but needed the expertise of human players to get there. Namely, it used a dataset of more than 100,000 Go games as a starting point for its own knowledge. AlphaGo Zero, by comparison, has only been programmed with the basic rules of Go. Everything else it learned from scratch. As described in a paper published in Nature today, Zero developed its Go skills by competing against itself. It started with random moves on the board, but every time it won, Zero updated its own system, and played itself again. And again. Millions of times over. After three days of self-play, Zero was strong enough to defeat the version of itself that beat 18-time world champion Lee Se-dol, winning handily -- 100 games to nil. After 40 days, it had a 90 percent win rate against the most advanced version of the original AlphaGo software. DeepMind says this makes it arguably the strongest Go player in history.

6 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Drug Design and Climate models by Lisandro · · Score: 1, Insightful

    We're all neural networks designing drugs and climate models.

  2. Re:STILL not a real AI by MrDozR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not impressed, doesn't prove anything, and why should anyone even care?

    Maybe because they're not trying to prove anything? Maybe their actual goal is to improve general purpose algorithms by an iterative approach? Like it says in the article. Which you read of course.

  3. Re:Drug Design and Climate models by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Though it's true that we're neural networks, we aren't the same neural networks as these are. Remember folks, "neural network" in the sense of AI is a marketing term, it does not in any way imply that it functions in a manner similar to how our brains work. Fact is, we have no idea how our brains work. We know what certain parts are responsible for, but no idea how they do it. If anybody claims to know, then please ask them to describe in detail how memory is encoded in our brains, and have them demonstrate by altering a memory in a predetermined way.

  4. Re:This is cool, but I'll be more interested when. by shaitand · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If it were all about tells there would be no online poker. Poker IS about reading other players but you can read a player from their play.

  5. Slashdot AI commentary summary... by JMZero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've decided that this accomplishment -- a dizzying milestone in artificial intelligence that not long ago was though impossible or at least decades away -- is actually meaningless and doesn't prove anything and they should clearly have been working on some other problem. I have no idea how their system works, but I'm confident that their approach is just "brute force" (or something, I clearly have no idea what even that means) and won't generalize to any "real" problem solving (with my definition of "real problem" subject to change without notice).

    I will only admit that any progress has been made towards artificial intelligence when computers perform exactly equivalent to humans in all tasks with no human intervention. I mean, I won't really, because I have weird quasi-spiritual hangups about believing computers can be intelligent, but that's where I'm putting the goal posts for now. Digital computers can't think, but I can because reasons. Free will or quantum mechanics or something else that I haven't thought about at all, probably.

    Also, cotton gins and blacksmiths, therefore computers will never take our jobs. Amen.

    --
    Let's not stir that bag of worms...
    1. Re:Slashdot AI commentary summary... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      It is brute force in the same way that a child would teach himself how to be a grandmaster. You give them the rules and quick feedback on how well they did. They then spend a lifetime playing the game. Each game they try different things and based on the feedback, they decide if it was a good change or not. After a billion matches, they will be amazing players.

      This approach to computer learning does that but can do it at such great speeds. This is brute force, but it played those billion matches in 3 days.

      What I find as the most amazing thing is that when the computer did beat the grandmaster, he did so with a move that was so amazing that the grandmaster did not understand it at first thinking it was a mistake. He then quickly realized the significance of it and knew he was defeated. There was only a hand full of people in the world that could even explain what had happened.

      And now, grandmasters are adopting many aspects of the computers playstyle. The game has forever been changed because the computer figured things out that we never could. It was not that long ago where we (humans) were certain that a computer could never beat a grandmaster at GO.