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DeepMind's Go-Playing AI Doesn't Need Human Help To Beat Us Anymore (theverge.com)
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.
I, for one, welcome our new Go-playing robotic overlords.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
... It can deal with hidden information.
So you mean something like poker? AI beats pros at Texas-Hold'em.
That's just what an AI would say, Mr. Schumann
Come now, lets be honest, it enjoys playing with itself just like everyone else.
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.
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.
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...