Will the team even continue pursuing the game of Go ? I can imagine they have accomplished their goal, and will now move to other targets.
No doubt that other teams will continue the work on Go, inspired by this method and its success.
That knowledge won't help us mitigate climate change, stop terrorism, or solve problems like world hunger
Carl Sagan would have disagreed with you:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi
I've seen games where the winning move was to sacrifice a queen for a pawn
Sure, but such sacrifices don't usually take very long. A queen sacrifice is usually followed by a series of forcing, or almost forcing, moves until either the queen is won back with interest, or until checkmate follows. Material counting by itself is a poor evaluation. You have to combine it with a reasonably deep search, which is possible for a chess program.
A minah bird or a parrot may learn to repeat hundreds of human speech patterns which it has learned by listening.
That's not what this computer is doing. It's coming up with completely new ideas. Of course, the ideas are bounded by the game space, but they are creative new ideas nonetheless. The computer played several unique moves, which expert players even dismissed at first, but later had to admit these were important moves later in the game.
Once researchers decide to agree on a definition of what AI is, only then can we decide if that goal is reached by a particular project.
In many fields of science people disagree on definitions. I can learn to speak Russian, and perhaps even reach that goal, without anybody ever agreeing on a definition what Russian exactly is.
So you want an extended "Turing Test". Fair enough. I can agree with that. Of course, it's obvious that we're not going to reach that goal out of a vacuum. It will require many small steps. Imagine telling the inventor of the transistor: "yeah, that's cute, but that's not what I meant when I describing an i7". I think the AlphaGo project showed a remarkable step in the right direction. We're still far away from the goal, but we're a clear step closer than before.
Come on, we both know what I meant.
Unfortunately, in the this debate, there are plenty of groups of people that don't understand what the other means.
Simple Turing tests may not suffice. Even though some of the current chatbot-type systems can converse passably for a little while, none can hold a genuinely sensible discussion on any abstract topic without stumbling and giving itself away rather quickly. I bet almost most people here could suss one out in fairly short order.
In other words: Turing tests (note I left out 'simple') do suffice.
Actually, the progress made in the last decade is nothing short of amazing, including this AlphaGo design. And the computation speed of your brain is orders of magnitude slower, so apparently that's not barrier. As long as it doesn't need to be sychronised, it's fairly easy to throw more hardware at a problem.
Go has a branching factor of about 250. This cannot be brute forced, even with aggressive pruning.
Go also has a difficult evaluation function. In chess, you can get reasonable results with little more than just counting material, whereas in Go, a stone placed on a certain location in a mostly empty corner may be much stronger than the same stone placed one square further, and this won't become obvious until 100 moves later in the game.
About 3% of the oil is used as feedstock for plastics, so it would only mean a modest increase in CO2. Besides, plastics in the ocean are already being (bio)degraded.
But the EU fund a lot of very important research in UK, and a lot of cooperation in research and education would not happen, or would be significantly different outside EU.
The EU gets their money from members states, and the richer member states put in more money than they take out. All the EU does is add a huge layer of pointless expenses.
Even better idea: let the students use the watches. Let them use books, notes and google, just like in the real world. Now, since everybody's got their notes, ask some real questions.
Slashdot Mirror
Go is not a game of chance
It could be, if you used dice to determine where to put the stones. There's even a small chance you'd win.
Maybe, at some time, they can even do the job of commenting on Slashdot, and you'll get to enjoy a bunch more free time.
What a waste of time. They could be solving real problems instead of this stupid shit.
Are you talking about the programmers or the Go players ?
I think that a rematch in a few years would be quite interresting.
If the development of the software continues, the human will be massacred, even with the new knowledge.
Will the team even continue pursuing the game of Go ? I can imagine they have accomplished their goal, and will now move to other targets. No doubt that other teams will continue the work on Go, inspired by this method and its success.
That knowledge won't help us mitigate climate change, stop terrorism, or solve problems like world hunger
Carl Sagan would have disagreed with you:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi
I've seen games where the winning move was to sacrifice a queen for a pawn
Sure, but such sacrifices don't usually take very long. A queen sacrifice is usually followed by a series of forcing, or almost forcing, moves until either the queen is won back with interest, or until checkmate follows. Material counting by itself is a poor evaluation. You have to combine it with a reasonably deep search, which is possible for a chess program.
Their whole purpose in the system is to fill gaps
No, the purpose is to make some people richer.
You forgot the most important one: the freedom to shoot your neighbour, because he wanted the same piece of food.
The goal is to make the shareholder richer -full stop.
If you fire all your employees, who's going to buy your product and raise the company value ?
A minah bird or a parrot may learn to repeat hundreds of human speech patterns which it has learned by listening.
That's not what this computer is doing. It's coming up with completely new ideas. Of course, the ideas are bounded by the game space, but they are creative new ideas nonetheless. The computer played several unique moves, which expert players even dismissed at first, but later had to admit these were important moves later in the game.
Once researchers decide to agree on a definition of what AI is, only then can we decide if that goal is reached by a particular project.
In many fields of science people disagree on definitions. I can learn to speak Russian, and perhaps even reach that goal, without anybody ever agreeing on a definition what Russian exactly is.
Come on, we both know what I meant.
Unfortunately, in the this debate, there are plenty of groups of people that don't understand what the other means.
For a professional player, it's fairly easy to remember an entire game. For them, it's a story with many familiar patterns and memorable surprises.
The goal posts are simple. "True AI" = Consciousness.
It's not a simple goal post if you can't provide a practical definition of consciousness.
and a robot that can perform *all* the activities of human
There are many people that can't perform *all* the activities of a human. Stephen Hawking can't even catch a ball.
Simple Turing tests may not suffice. Even though some of the current chatbot-type systems can converse passably for a little while, none can hold a genuinely sensible discussion on any abstract topic without stumbling and giving itself away rather quickly. I bet almost most people here could suss one out in fairly short order.
In other words: Turing tests (note I left out 'simple') do suffice.
Actually, the progress made in the last decade is nothing short of amazing, including this AlphaGo design. And the computation speed of your brain is orders of magnitude slower, so apparently that's not barrier. As long as it doesn't need to be sychronised, it's fairly easy to throw more hardware at a problem.
To me, "true AI" is something that can decide to do something other than that for which it was constructed
Many people can't even decide to stop eating.
Go has a branching factor of about 250. This cannot be brute forced, even with aggressive pruning.
Go also has a difficult evaluation function. In chess, you can get reasonable results with little more than just counting material, whereas in Go, a stone placed on a certain location in a mostly empty corner may be much stronger than the same stone placed one square further, and this won't become obvious until 100 moves later in the game.
Human brains are also just a clever use of neural networks on a particular problem.
About 3% of the oil is used as feedstock for plastics, so it would only mean a modest increase in CO2. Besides, plastics in the ocean are already being (bio)degraded.
But the EU fund a lot of very important research in UK, and a lot of cooperation in research and education would not happen, or would be significantly different outside EU.
The EU gets their money from members states, and the richer member states put in more money than they take out. All the EU does is add a huge layer of pointless expenses.
No, Mr. Lee, it is the computer that is speechless.
You don't need intricate fighting moves when your fists are made from steel.
Even better idea: let the students use the watches. Let them use books, notes and google, just like in the real world. Now, since everybody's got their notes, ask some real questions.
*GASP* Holy crap! How dumb is that?
Until now, nobody cared much about CO2, so there wasn't a need to measure it accurately.