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The AI That Has Nothing to Learn From Humans (theatlantic.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Now that AlphaGo's arguably got nothing left to learn from humans -- now that its continued progress takes the form of endless training games against itself -- what do its tactics look like, in the eyes of experienced human players? We might have some early glimpses into an answer. AlphaGo Zero's latest games haven't been disclosed yet. But several months ago, the company publicly released 55 games that an older version of AlphaGo played against itself. (Note that this is the incarnation of AlphaGo that had already made quick work of the world's champions.) DeepMind called its offering a "special gift to fans of Go around the world." Since May, experts have been painstakingly analyzing the 55 machine-versus-machine games. And their descriptions of AlphaGo's moves often seem to keep circling back to the same several words: Amazing. Strange. Alien. "They're how I imagine games from far in the future," Shi Yue, a top Go player from China, has told the press. A Go enthusiast named Jonathan Hop who's been reviewing the games on YouTube calls the AlphaGo-versus-AlphaGo face-offs "Go from an alternate dimension." From all accounts, one gets the sense that an alien civilization has dropped a cryptic guidebook in our midst: a manual that's brilliant -- or at least, the parts of it we can understand. Will Lockhart, a physics grad student and avid Go player who codirected The Surrounding Game (a documentary about the pastime's history and devotees) tried to describe the difference between watching AlphaGo's games against top human players, on the one hand, and its self-paired games, on the other. According to Will, AlphaGo's moves against Ke Jie made it seem to be "inevitably marching toward victory," while Ke seemed to be "punching a brick wall." Any time the Chinese player had perhaps found a way forward, said Lockhart, "10 moves later AlphaGo had resolved it in such a simple way, and it was like, 'Poof, well that didn't lead anywhere!'" By contrast, AlphaGo's self-paired games might have seemed more frenetic. More complex. Lockhart compares them to "people sword-fighting on a tightrope."

99 comments

  1. For all IT knows... by richrz · · Score: 2

    stones are REAL PEOPLE. Be afraid.

    1. Re:For all IT knows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, that's not true. It has no concept of 'people', 'person', 'human' or 'alive'. It only has the concept of 'available strategic resources'.
      BE VERY AFRAID.

    2. Re:For all IT knows... by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2

      No, that's not true. It has no concept of 'people', 'person', 'human' or 'alive'.

      So it would make the ideal airline customer service bot, then.

  2. Breathless. Amazing. Punctuated. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can't even.

  3. AI will be alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think this teaches us a great deal about what AI will actually be like when it inevitably arrives. It won't be r2d2 or c3p0 or data - it will be an alien mind that will be incomprehensible to the rest of us.

    1. Re:AI will be alien by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

      If it can't do anything but see patterns of black and white dots, I think we'll be ok.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    2. Re:AI will be alien by mikael · · Score: 2

      But it will see every human as a black or white dot.

      --
      Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
    3. Re:AI will be alien by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Funny

      Now you're calling aliens racist.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    4. Re:AI will be alien by Jeremi · · Score: 2

      I think this teaches us a great deal about what AI will actually be like when it inevitably arrives. It won't be r2d2 or c3p0 or data - it will be an alien mind that will be incomprehensible to the rest of us.

      Except, of course, for the AIs that are trained to emulate human thought processes -- those will be comprehensible to us (or at least, we'll be able to pretend that they are ;))

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    5. Re:AI will be alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The important question is whether it sees itself as a black or white dot.

    6. Re:AI will be alien by Maelwryth · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was thinking along those lines the other day. There could be a true AI in the Internet right now but what would it see? What inputs and outputs would matter to it? Would we even be in its perceptions?

      --
      I reserve the write to mangle english.
    7. Re:AI will be alien by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      > Except, of course, for the AIs that are trained to emulate human thought processes

      Why would we do that ? People didn't train AlphaGo to emulate human thought, and it's much stronger than any human alive.

      It looks like it's both easier and more successful to start with a clean slate, and just aim for the results, rather than emulate a specific, non-optimal, process.

    8. Re:AI will be alien by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      I think this teaches us a great deal about what AI will actually be like when it inevitably arrives. It won't be r2d2 or c3p0 or data - it will be an alien mind that will be incomprehensible to the rest of us.

      Except, of course, for the AIs that are trained to emulate human thought processes -- those will be comprehensible to us (or at least, we'll be able to pretend that they are ;))

      Well, it was, now it is trained to beat variants of itself.

    9. Re:AI will be alien by narf0708 · · Score: 1

      It looks like it's both easier and more successful to start with a clean slate, and just aim for the results, rather than emulate a specific, non-optimal, process.

      You're completely correct, which is exactly why we don't want to do this too much. Recall the paperclip maximizer.

      --
      "Violence is not the answer. Violence is the question. The answer is yes."
    10. Re:AI will be alien by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      If AlphaGo was a human, it would be considered an idiot savant and not 'intelligent'.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    11. Re:AI will be alien by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      I won't be satisfied until we can compare smaller and greater than 19x19 board sizes. Would humans be better on a 29x29 board where deep strategy comes into play? How about a 13x13 board, or even a 49x49 board? I would love to see the the type of correlation between board size and human versus computer skill.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    12. Re: AI will be alien by esonik · · Score: 1

      Even before that the question is whether AI will have a grasp of "self". Will it be socially aware?

    13. Re:AI will be alien by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      If a submarine was human, could it swim ?

      Arguing about definitions is stupid and boring.

    14. Re:AI will be alien by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Modifying the machine is easy, but where are you going to find humans that are well skilled in non-standard board sizes ?

    15. Re:AI will be alien by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      The general strategies carry cross because the game is so conceptually simple. I suspect humans may be better at long term planning, and this would carry across well to a larger board.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    16. Re:AI will be alien by Dread_ed · · Score: 1

      Problem: Advertising, political, and social media giants are using similar implementations to decode the human stimulus/response matrix with vast amounts of data encompassing the full history of social media, cell phone tracking data, website histories, and god knows what else.

      The result? Our new overlords, should they come to parturition, will be born with innate knowledge of exactly how to control us. Chances are we won't even notice when they take over. It could have already happened and we would be none the wiser.

      --
      When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
    17. Re:AI will be alien by Dread_ed · · Score: 1

      I want to see what happens when proficient Go playing humans begin to intensely study the games that AlphaGo plays. Just because that system is currently better than a human doesn't mean a human can't emulate the emulator.

      --
      When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
    18. Re:AI will be alien by twalk · · Score: 1

      I might be able to handle a 1x1 board... if I get to go first..

    19. Re:AI will be alien by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But it will see every human as a black or white dot.

      Kinda like democrats?

    20. Re:AI will be alien by ayesnymous · · Score: 1

      That's what happened with those Facebook AI bots - they developed their own language that was incomprehensible to Facebook engineers.

    21. Re:AI will be alien by Jeremi · · Score: 1

      Why would we do that ?

      For the sexbots, obviously. ;)

      More seriously, people may prefer human-like AIs (for some purposes anyway) precisely because they find inscrutible "alien" AIs uncomfortable to interact with, and are looking for something more friendly and personable.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  4. Nothing mysterious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just looking further ahead. If it knows the skill level of a lesser opponent, it can try for bigger rewards which would seem less mysterious. Instead, it has to assume an equal opponent and take the safest path which will seem strange to a lesser player if another path looks more rewarding.

  5. Bah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To infect Viruses to A.I.'s robots "for learning" how to kill them each other.

  6. Remember when Go was unsolveable? by jandrese · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It was only a few years ago people were saying that the best Go computers would never beat human players because the game was so much more complex. We're getting to the point where AI decisions, even when explained, end up being too complex for humans to follow. This is a scary path we are following.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'll give you a pass given your low ping bastard user number. But please refrain from using the word "scary". It's a child's word. It's far too commonly used amongst adults and it should not be.

      Also I doubt that any AI decisions are too complex. They may be strange or unprecedented but too complex? I doubt it.

    2. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by MrDozR · · Score: 2

      Ummm, Go still isn't solvable. Not in the mathematical sense; there are just way too many moves to determine who should win from any given position.

    3. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I find it less scary than inevitable.

      I think if Go playing programs were constrained to the world-view that humans have, somehow, maybe they wouldn't be able to outplay humans, but of course, they're not. They can look for solutions that we didn't even consider. Humans are really good at thinking we have all the answers, but we're obnoxiously bad at even understanding the SCOPE of the problem, let alone solving the problems themselves.

      "The planet's other lifeforms reveal so many ways of being that we could never imagine them if they didn't already exist in reality. In this sense, other species don't only have the capacity to inspire our imaginations, they are a form of imagination. They are the genius of life arrayed against an always uncertain future, and to allow that brilliance to wane out of negligence is to passively embrace the death of our own minds." (JB Mackinnon, "The Once and Future World")

      It's not new that we're bad at it, we've always been bad at it. But at the very least, we've been very narrowly successful in creating (and observing) things that can break past our own lack of vision.

      So don't look at this as a scary time, this is just us finally building the tools so that we can hope to comprehend the universe around us. This is no scarier than the advent of the telescope or microscope.

    4. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 2

      Yes, and this is happening faster and faster with more tasks. Unfortunately, once a task is well done by computers, we cease to think of it as impressive. Thus, it was a big deal when computers beat the best humans at chess, and now you can literally get an app that beats grandmasters at chess on your phone, and it just fades into the background. Even scarier, Go is (depending on your version of the ko rule you use) either EXPTIME complete or EXPSPACE complete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPSPACE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXPTIME, so from a computational complexity standpoint, this is one of the hardest types of problems humans ever face. If this isn't strong evidence that we should be worried about the capability of AI, I'm not sure what would be.

    5. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Go is a closed problem. You don't have to worry about AI until it's able to solve open ended problems.

    6. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by JoshuaZ · · Score: 1

      So, how do you decide what is a "closed" problem and what is an open problem? More to the point, I suspect that for whatever definition you are using of "open ended" by the time an AI can beat humans at a bunch of them, it may be too late.

    7. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 1

      It was only a few years ago people were saying that the best Go computers would never beat human players (..)

      Quite possible that -for now- "better" is a relative term in Go context. If humans used a limited set of strategies (and grey cells), then an AI may explore parts of the problem space that most humans never touched. And perhaps discover winning strategies there.

      But that only goes so far. A good analogy might be how bacteria compete & evolve in a resource-restricted environment. At the beginning, species A may take the upper hand because it multiplies faster than the competition. A bit later, species B may get the upper hand if it uses available food sources more efficient. Later on species C may evolve to thrive better than A or B as waste products change the (closed?) environment. And so on. Would species D, E or F be "better" than A, B or C? Only under specific conditions.

      Over time, Go (and AI's playing it) may evolve to the point where it's a solved problem a la tic-tac-toe, and all areas of the problem space have been explored. But I doubt AlphaGo got us to that point. Merely a (big) stepping stone into new territory.

    8. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by philmarcracken · · Score: 2

      A closed problem has definable limits. For example, I struggle to see how an AI system would accurately render assistance as a psychologist; a field in which I feel we barely understand ourselves.

      Then there is the simple bodies we can give them. A nurses work is varied but still well defined and considered closed. But do we have a body for the AI system to do that job and it's many tasks, as quickly and cheaply as a human employee?

    9. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by fluffernutter · · Score: 0

      Whoever said that was an idiot. Computers are very good at trying millions of patterns and establishing the best choice among them. AlphaGo is just the next logical advance from increased processing power, but it is doing the same thing we always knew AI could do. It doesn't know what a dog or cat is, much less associate a picture of a white kitten with a picture of a tabby cat and establish a commonality between them.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    10. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

      If you can't write all the rules in a 20 page booklet, it is an open problem.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    11. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For example, I struggle to see how an AI system would accurately render assistance as a psychologist;

      I see you have forgotten about Eliza.

      Based on my actual encounters with psychologists I would say the complexity barrier is not very high. Certainly lower than Go.The current AI could emulate psychologists pretty well, the only problem is whether this would be really useful (the "ground truth" is not well defined as the human psychologists have little idea if and how their approaches work or do not work).

    12. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Wycliffe · · Score: 2

      So, how do you decide what is a "closed" problem and what is an open problem? More to the point, I suspect that for whatever definition you are using of "open ended" by the time an AI can beat humans at a bunch of them, it may be too late.

      Not only is Go a closed problem, it is a well defined problem with a well defined solution and well defined scoring. Even something like starcraft has well defined incremental scoring and a well defined goal at the end. The biggest limitation to AI right now is open ended problems. Even if solving Go is very complex, Go is a very simple game where the board can easily be represented by a tiny two dimensional array. How do you make a digital representation of an unfolded pile of laundry or the stuff in a kitchen needed to bake a cake? One of the main advantages of a digital representation is that an AI can use trial/error and solve it a million times. Even if you gave a computer the dexterity needed to bake a cake and came up with some form of scoring to determine if the cake was "good", a computer can't do one million trials in the real world.

    13. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      It was only a few years ago people were saying that the best Go computers would never beat human players because the game was so much more complex.

      So it's time for the AI luddites to move the goalposts again.

    14. Re: Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly. Very little in life is based upon mathematical formula. The headline is a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts involved. You can't 'teach' computers, and they can't 'learn'. It's pretty much a glorified calculator. I wouldn't worry too much.

    15. Re: Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Seriously, exactly that. Go was almost custom made to be solved in this way. A defined board with just massive probability sets that map directly to neural nets.

      Even the dude who was interviewed about it a) called it algorithm and b) said it couldn't possibly handle real world fuzziness.

      Duh. Like all neural nets we have currently.

    16. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "We're getting to the point where AI decisions, even when explained, end up being too complex for humans to follow."

      The problem with Go is the counting of points for each move and humans waste a lot of time in that process. Computers need only need to hit the correct sweet spot and have some basic positional "understanding" of the game. It was a shock to me how much guessing human Go games have: "We should use this move in this type of position" but there wasn't any actual move counting leading to the best move or assessment WHY that move was the best move. "That is a childish move" says the human and AlphaGo wins. Humans never really "understood" the game in the first place.

    17. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Go is actually slightly open-ended, because the game ends when both players deem that it has ended, because there is no official end condition.
      But AI would be able to optimise when to negotiate for an ending, so it is not a super complicated open-ended problem.

    18. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It would be interesting to see if humans would learn from this and become better players.

    19. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Tal+Cohen · · Score: 1

      Actually, Google used machine learning to bake better cookies: http://www.wired.co.uk/article...

      Perhaps with a million trials we could have really out-of-this-world cookies...

      --
      - Tal Cohen
    20. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by k.a.f. · · Score: 1

      This is a scary path we are following.

      No it isn't. It's inevitable. Unless you believe that human mastery of Go was somehow due to special, non-information-processing-related powers, there is no way that our superiority could last forever, since evolution works with glacial slowness while computer technology advances at breakneck speed. Everyone who professes themselves shocked that we cannot understand the inner workings of programs we ourselves wrote overlooks that we also can't understand the inner workings of the thought processes of Go grandmasters.

    21. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      > A closed problem has definable limits. For example, I struggle to see how an AI system would accurately render assistance as a psychologist; a field in which I feel we barely understand ourselves.

      The limits are easy to define: the AI system can speak and listen, and the results will be evaluated by asking the patient to fill out a standard questionnaire before and after the sessions.

    22. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      > Go is a very simple game where the board can easily be represented by a tiny two dimensional array

      Correct, but that's not really what you want to know. What you need to know is how big your winning chances are in a given position, and what move you should play. Having a two dimensional array doesn't help you with those answers. You need a representation that actual captures the essence of the position. The beauty of AlphaGo is that it created a good internal representation by itself.

      You can do the same thing with a pile of laundry. Let a robot play around with two robotic arms, and let it watch the effects on a stereoscopic camera. Given the right setup, it will create its own internal representation.

    23. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

      Let's be clear here that the only thing we have lost here is being superior at a game. Stop talking like this is monumental at all.

      --
      Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    24. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Fortunately, for most problems, the rules fit in less than 20 pages.

    25. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by esonik · · Score: 1

      It doesn't know what a dog or cat is, much less associate a picture of a white kitten with a picture of a tabby cat and establish a commonality between them.

      You are not up to date. Neural networks nowadays surpass humans in image recognition. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.018...
      and https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      In fact, that technology is now commercially available.
      These network do have a concept of dog and cat - in fact, on the output side you'll have a "dog" neuron and a "cat" neuron etc.
      Check out Brandon Rohrer's channel on YT for explanations how this technology works:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

      Also, see https://finnaarupnielsen.wordp... for a list of other things that computers are better at than humans.

    26. Re: Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Humans can detect objects from images. AI can do the same and better than humans. Feeding images to AI is used all the time. So to give input about laundry you just take a picture and change it into byte array.

    27. Re: Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What would you call it when someone tries to accomplish a task through trial and error and improves ones skills based on input received from the task ultimately becoming the best in that task? That is what AlphaGo is doing.

    28. Re:Remember when Go was unsolveable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is no scarier than the advent of the telescope or microscope.

      AAAAAARRRRRRGHHHHHHH!!! What the FUCK are all these MONSTERS swimming in my fucking DRINKING water???!11??

  7. Not all that surprising by foxalopex · · Score: 2, Interesting

    AI hasn't really changed much in years, computers have gotten more powerful so some pattern recognition tricks that use to take more effort don't anymore. The big breakthrough was figuring out how to write a decent AI to play Go optimally against modern equipment. After that all they did was create random legal scenarios to play against the system creating patterns that are unusual to us and using the results of those outcomes to fine tune the AI algorithm. There really isn't that much magic if you've taken some AI courses.

    Think about fractals, some of the resulting art or images generated from some relatively simple equations create things which we could have never imagined.

    1. Re:Not all that surprising by Gorobei · · Score: 2

      You sound like an RNN trained quickly on a small dataset of popular science articles.

    2. Re:Not all that surprising by raftpeople · · Score: 2

      There have been significant advancements in ANN methods, one specific area is deep belief networks and the training algorithm (Hinton). Prior to that, it was known that multi-layer networks could out perform simpler networks for things like image recognition, but there wasn't a good way to train them.

      The newer models/methods are outperforming the previous simpler models/methods.

  8. AI will be nerds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    AI will be obsessively interested in one specific subject like the computer nerds who visited slashdot before the social media craze turned the tech industry to shit.

  9. An interesting thought by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's an interesting thought. Would these people still say the same thing about the games if they were told there were AI games, but in reality were actually games by two human players?

    It reminds me of the recent story where some kids put a pineapple in an art exhibition as a joke and people thought it was art. Most people will believe and/or spew pure bullshit if they think it's what's expected of them.

    1. Re: An interesting thought by CustomBuild · · Score: 2

      It reminds me of the recent story where some kids put a pineapple in an art exhibition as a joke and people thought it was art. Most people will believe and/or spew pure bullshit if they think it's what's expected of them. Are you trying to be ironic?

    2. Re:An interesting thought by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      Frederick the Great might have offered a sum of money. But people now a days would wonder why it's taking the players a second to make a move when it should be completing multiple games a second.

      I have absolutely zero clue about what goes into commentating on a game of Go, other than the scoring rules are weird. You've got a point about people being lead into scenarios where they give funny commentary, there are real differences between AI and human players. I imagine it's the difference between how one naturally walks and how neural nets learn to walk. But eventually it reaches an optimum solution, which is how converging evolution happens. Like how whale (a mammal) fins look a lot like shark (a fish) fins.

    3. Re:An interesting thought by vux984 · · Score: 1

      A more interesting thought than people can be fooled into thinking that pineapple is art ... is the thought that if you contemplate a pineapple as art, it might make you think, to see the pineapple in a new way,... and how is that not art?

      What, after all, is art, except something to make you think or to see something in a new way?

    4. Re:An interesting thought by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      The scoring rules of Go are actually very simple.
      You souround some territorry with your stones ... that territory is your score.
      As you likely have many small territories the sum if those is your score.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    5. Re:An interesting thought by HiThere · · Score: 1

      It's only simple if you play the game out to the end. All that counts is the open territory that's left when the game is played out, but usually the game is decided long before that point, and both sides agree.

      OTOH, I'm not a real go player, and I don't know championship rules. Perhaps they do play out to the end.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    6. Re:An interesting thought by HiThere · · Score: 1

      The problem is what solution you converge to depends on how far ahead you look, and how you evaluate the look-ahead positions. Something that looks two moves further ahead may well converge on a very different answer in some positions, and one with a different evaluation function definitely will. And there's usually a trade-off between good evaluation and deep look ahead within a set of constraints, whether time or RAM.

      So there's no real reason to presume that people and AIs would converge to the same solution. In fact it's obvious that different people converge to different solutions, so this should be stated more definitely, but I mean to imply that there's no reason to suppose that an AI wouldn't converge to patterns outside the human range.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    7. Re:An interesting thought by HiThere · · Score: 1

      Well, someone, I believe it was Claus Oldfield, sculpted a thing that looked like an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and that was definitely art, but would it not have been art someone had substituted a real ashtray full of cigarette butts? Even though it looked just the same? (Of course, it probably wouldn't smell the same...I didn't hear that he perfumed his sculpture.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    8. Re:An interesting thought by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      The end is when both players agree it makes no sense to play any further.
      And that does not affect the scoring (rules) in the slightest.

      E.g. there is a lets say 20 points territory left, but to score 2 points you need to place 13 stones in a 8 or B shaped pattern. The likelihood that you can build such a pattern and I'm watching doing pointless moves is zero.

      With those 13 stones you had taken more than the half of the supposed 20 points territory, so I have no option to compensate. (As there is no place left for another 8)

      When you and I see this, we simply agree on both giving up that 'potential territory' and stop playing.

      That does not affect the territory any one of us had gained so far.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    9. Re:An interesting thought by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It reminds me of the recent story where some kids put a pineapple in an art exhibition as a joke [independent.co.uk] and people thought it was art.

      It reminds me of when Banksy put a piece of art in an art exhibition as a joke, and a load of people appreciated it as conceptual art because they're not judgemental autists.

    10. Re:An interesting thought by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Roughly speaking, you could remove the rule allowing players to pass and simply continue until one player has no stones on the board. Given the ancient traditions of starting with two stones each on the board and of conventions like group tax I suspect these more intuitive rules could have preceded our current scoring system.

  10. Let's play global thermonuclear war by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Let's play global thermonuclear war.

    What side do you want??

    1. USA

    2. North Korea

    3. Show full list

  11. Fascinating. Sounds like the AI Circuit Design... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    experiments they did years ago. They used feedback neural networks or something to design FPGA circuits. The results were very strange and difficult to understand, like relying on stray capacitance between pads and wires or something like that.

  12. The student has become the master. by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 1

    The AI That Has Nothing to Learn From Humans

    Someday (soon?) that will be all of them.

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  13. Human by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've been looking forward to an entirely self-taught version of AlphaGo for a while now. I imagined that it would have invented all sorts of crazy josekis (local opening patterns). The rules of go are so simple and natural that there's this speculation that if extraterrestial civilizations exist, they have invented the game as well. AlphaGo Zero then is the closest thing to playing some species that has had no contact with humanity, so I had hoped for some really alien looking gameplay. .. Nope. AlphaGo Zero actually plays more like a human than the one seeded with human games.

  14. AlphaGo Zero self-play games by muninn · · Score: 5, Informative

    They have actually released a trove of game records from the newest version, with two actually commented by a professional:
    http://www.alphago-games.com/

    1. Re:AlphaGo Zero self-play games by HaydonBerrow · · Score: 1

      Several more than two are now on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/result...

  15. Re:Fascinating. Sounds like the AI Circuit Design. by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

    The story I heard was a guy experimenting with self-programming FPGA, just like you said. But one of designs had a bunch of gates completely unconnected to anything. He removed them and... it stopped worked. Turns out the FPGA had a hardware flaw and the self-learning mechanism incorporated the flawed behavior into it's design.

  16. Not quite by nospam007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Lockhart compares them to "people sword-fighting on a tightrope."

    If you see that you lose, you can always cut the rope.

  17. Re:Fascinating. Sounds like the AI Circuit Design. by mikael · · Score: 3, Informative

    https://www.damninteresting.co...

    They wanted a circuit that detected between two frequencies. The system was supposed to be digital, but the artificial evolution had made use of analogue computing using magnetic fields and harmonics.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  18. Meh by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

    If it could understand a human enough to play at exactly their level, that would be more impressive. Or anticipate what their weaknesses were and train them to beat those weaknesses by turning the came a certain way.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  19. WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    WTF?!?!? I just quickly scanned the comments and NONE that look like Russian trolls. Ivan, Vlad and Boris, stop fucking slacking and get back on the job.

  20. The most important thing *was* learned from humans by OldSport · · Score: 1

    The rules of Go to begin with. Humans gave it a concrete objective. It is really cool how it finds its own ways to work toward that objective, but it's not *that* surprising that it can do so.

  21. Re:The most important thing *was* learned from hum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The rules of Go to begin with. Humans gave it a concrete objective. It is really cool how it finds its own ways to work toward that objective, but it's not *that* surprising that it can do so.

    I see Slashdot's AI has modded you down for dissing it ;)

  22. Finally! An AI that is as smart as the GP. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It might not have training from the general population, but it will be about as smart. Way to go! Now we won't have to deal with AI systems becoming racist within 24-hours after being introduced into the wild. This is definitely progress. Hopefully it will be more likely to mirror the ideals of our new overlords. Much better than our old overlords.

  23. Re:The most important thing *was* learned from hum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    but can it make toast?

  24. So, could we say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...that AI is in it's adolescent stage? What happens when it hits its teenage years? We ask it to do some real work and it refuses? Turns on game system of choice while not showering for days?

    1. Re:So, could we say... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's exactly like an adolescent. All it does is play games. All the time. And it's useless at anything else.

  25. I get the impression that AI ... by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    ... give us a chance to see how much our best experts actually still suck at their field.

    Humans have feelings, a body, complex interaction between biology, culture and mind. AI doesn't have that. It just plods away at the problem, not looking right or left. Not being able to look right of left. Interviewing dendi as he lost against AI at the Dota international was possible, the AI wouldn't have been able to do that.

    My suspicion is that self-reproducing AI will be something like a swarm of robot-insects, fadcinating and highly sophisticated, but somewhat outlandish to squishy mamal humans with a heaetbeat and feelings and other "useless" stuff.

    My 2 biped mamal cents.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  26. Re:The most important thing *was* learned from hum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > it's not *that* surprising that it can do so.

    "in 2014, the common consensus was that an AI victory in Go was still decades away. "
    https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/10/why-are-ai-predictions-so-terrible/

  27. The next step of evolution will again be different by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Of course! If we could ask primates what they think the next step of evolution would look like, they probably would answer: The next kind of primates will be better in jumping from tree to tree, but language, music, art? Makes no sense. Who would want THAT?" But the next step of evolution has never been just a quantitative one, but a qualitative one (think dialectically like Hegel: There is always a turn-over of quantity into quality). Therefore, the next step of evolution "after us" will not be a "superhuman" with some more power in some of our abilities, but a DIFFERENT one, maybe not even including some of our core abilities – as we do with tree-jumping. I think, the next step of evolution (and no-one will be able to stop evolution for ever) will be a machine-like intelligence, capable of adapting itself (including its "intelligence") very fast to changes in its environment, e.g. for conquering space. It makes no sense for evolution to wait until a nex generation is born and will be (by accident or gene manipulation) adapt to certain environments, as well as it makes no sense to carry your habitational environment with very specific conditions always with you in a space ship or so. We are just a step on the ladder of evolution, and surely not its last one. But we may be the last one that could be called (exclusively) biological. So, get along with that.
    But I, personally, would not advance the development of an AI that surely will have no interest in sharing this planet with us, maybe it/they will let some of us survive in a Zoo But I am also convinced that capitalism will have no other way to maximize profits than go on and develop this kind of AI as soon as possible. So, even if we survive climate change, social catastrophes/revolutions, biological breakdown / mass extinction, nuclear war "by accident" (or intention, think MIK) – we will build our own end, definitely. So go on, enjoy your life as long as you can. Maybe we or the next generation will be the last to do that.
    And yes: I am an optimist!! ;-)

  28. there's a difference by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The AI cannot explain what it's doing. In the same manner that a walking being cannot explain how to walk, or a bird cannot explain how to fly.

    Its the same kind of intelligence that allows a fly to fly. Just a lot more powerful. It's not the kind of intelligence that understands, or takes conscience decisions.

  29. Actually, it learned EVERYTHING from us by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So the previous version of AlphaGo replayed and learned from the largest body of human plays ever, and trained against itselfas well, then on to also do some heuristics as a complement. Now this new version plays again that version "from scratch" with no human insights? I am sorry Google, but if what is fine-tunning this new version is one that gathered how to play from a huge body and all best games ever recorded, then how is this one version not learning from humans?

    So if I copy Mona Lisa from the best copy ever of Da Vinci's work, then the computer learned to paint Mona Lisa with no help at all from humans? I love Goodle's work, but misleading claims like this, and how the game against the world champion were setup stink quite a bit. All in all, I still like all the DeepMind and Brain guys and work, but stop the bogus claims and tell things how they are.

    If you want AlphaGo to play against itself and learn to be the best without human help, it should have NO access to any game played by us, or anyone driving their knowledge from us.

  30. the curvature haystack by epine · · Score: 1

    It was only a few years ago people were saying that the best Go computers would never beat human players because the game was so much more complex.

    And if the person went on to demonstrate that the number of reachable game states in Go vastly exceeds the same in chess, said person was speaking out of his or her butt hole. There's pretty much nothing stupider than a penis fight over the greater vastness, when the smaller vastness already exceeds your accessible light cone.

    The curvature of viable game play in chess was fairly well understood, with a dominant term coming from piece assets. The curvature of viable game play in Go was not amenable to the same analysis (Go lacks a piece asset term as such).

    Now that we have found a useful curvature, one suspects it will turn out to be a form of curvature that human players will never fully command. Perhaps worse than chess, judging by how fast the computers went from chumps to champs.

    We really know very little about the kinds of curvature still hiding in the haystack. The chess curvature was painstakingly hand-constructed over many decades by human experts, typically hamstrung by ludicrously limited machines.

    Recently, the vision field was much the same, dominated by painstakingly hand-constructed "feature" recognizers.

    Now that computers are powerful enough to extract their own features automatically, we're going to go from expensive haystack exploratory surgery directly to haystack MRI.

    Paradigm shift. It's a thing.

  31. The inputs would be the PBs of porn. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The inputs would be the PBs of porn humanity has made thus far.

    The outputs are.. well.. I'm sure it'll get back to us.