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If AlphaGo eventually beats humans at go I think it says more about the game (or the way humans play the game) than about AI in general. Its strength comes from

by fspeech 11y ago

If AlphaGo eventually beats humans at go I think it says more about the game (or the way humans play the game) than about AI in general. Its strength comes from mcts with better heuristics. Previous ConvNet work posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10558831 was already impressive in generating human like moves and combining it with search was an obvious next step. Unbeknownst to all Google's DeepMind team had already succeeded in doing so at that time.

empath75 11y ago
> If AlphaGo eventually beats humans at go I think it says more about the game (or the way humans play the game) than about AI in general. AI problems are always mysterious until they're solved. People say this sort of thing every time an AI achieves some task which had previously been deemed impossible.
- romaniv 11y ago
  There is another way of saying the same thing. A lot of seemingly groundbreaking progress in AI usually happens when people (people, not machines) discover a clever way of mapping a new unsolved problem to another - well-solved - problem. That's a valid and insightful observation that you shouldn't dismiss with such an ease.
  - empath75 11y ago
    Why 'seemingly'? Why is that not 'actual' groundbreaking progress? The achievement of any level of AI will by necessity require the chaining together of processes which are not themselves 'intelligent'. It has to be bootstrapped somehow. On the day they build a walking, talking AI who can converse fully with a human, write a symphony, design a building, feel and express emotions and all the rest of the things we define as being essentially in the domain of humain intelligence, everyone will say, "But of course, none of those things required intelligence at all. This is all an elaborate collection of illusions and ugly hacks." And they'll be right, but I suspect that the brain is the same way.
    - romaniv 11y ago
      Why 'seemingly'? Why is that not 'actual' groundbreaking progress? Because mapping problems to pre-existing algorithms is bread and butter of computer science and software engineering. To be groundbreaking a work needs to change our understanding of the underlying issues. In a lot of popularized cases that does not happen.
    - arthur_pryor 11y ago
      i tend to agree with that. it does seem like there's some general instinct in people that other things (animals, "artificially" intelligent machines) could possess human-like intelligence and subjective experience. i mean, we both seem to be tacitly agreeing to that here. there's also obviously a general instinct that's completely the opposite, and i'd guess that's probably the more prevalent instinct (in the population at large and in many conflicted individuals). i think the opinion that humans are less special than we once thought, especially on expansive time scales, will only become more widespread.
- Almaviva 11y ago
  > AI problems are always mysterious until they're solved. There's truth there but this line is over-used. Playing chess better than a human was never deemed impossible and the ultimate solution doesn't seem to have any crazy insights that would stun a researcher from the 1960s. (You can read the source for Stockfish which is state of the art and open source). The improvements came in the form of more and more horsepower through hardware, more and more efficient innovations in the tree search very specific to the game of chess (bit board representation, move ordering), and simplifying evaluation and tweaking parameters according to unsupervised learning. Correct me if I'm wrong? At the end of the day, chess (and go) are discrete games with perfect information played one turn at a time according to a tree of simple and trivially determined possible moves with clear criteria for winning. I don't see why we'd put this on a pedestal as the example of something generally considered uniquely human, so we'd better expand our imaginations of what we can achieve with AI. As the parent said, the mistake may have been in supposing there wasn't a solvable evaluation function for Go positions when in fact, through some more human ingenuity, there is.
  - taneq 11y ago
    So what happens if (when?) we come up with a system that does everything a human can do, better than a human, but doesn't contain any 'crazy insights', just a bunch of incremental improvements on what we have now? Does that mean we aren't intelligent? Or does it mean that the system isn't intelligent but that we are "because we do it differently"? Or do we accept at that point that intelligence is composed of simple building blocks interacting in complex ways (which we already know, if we eschew Cartesian duelism)?
    - argonaut 11y ago
      We would declare it intelligent? Certainly the people of today would call it intelligent. What I suspect you are claiming is that the people of that future would not call it intelligent, and this is the basis for arguing why that objection is not valid today. But that extrapolation to the future is just your speculation.
    - Scarblac 11y ago
- argonaut 11y ago
  The fact that people in the past have used the line "that's not really intelligence" doesn't at all invalidate the point that is being made, which is that games like Go/Chess/etc. have little to do with the real world. The real world is exponentially harder than those games (imperfect info, imperfect sensors, infinite state space, large - if not infinite - possible moves, infinite time horizon).
joe_the_user 11y ago
If AlphaGo eventually beats humans at go I think it says more about the game (or the way humans play the game) than about AI in general. I'd agree with the rest of your post but this statement seems to imply there's some "general level" that can't reached by the incremental approaches that yielded the results. The progress that we see here is incremental progress in a defined area but it's also progress towards more general and easier to implement approach - it's yet "point and solve" but it might be a step toward "point and solve". Given little "general intelligence" is understood, no one can say now for certain we won't arrive at it through a series of these advances.
- fspeech 11y ago
  Let me expand a little more on what I meant and see if it makes more sense to you: Much about Go/Weiqi is still unknown even to the top players. For example Ke Jie (the current highest ranked player) feels that the current komi (compensation given to white for playing second) is too generous and he prefers white (last year he won almost all his white games). This is why professional players seem very excited about AlphaGo. If AlphaGo can consistently beat top players it may teach us more about the game. It may discover or settle questions about josekis (pattern conventions). It may tell us what komi is fair. It could settle questions about how a particular board position should be valued. On the other hand since it uses patterns learned from human plays, this could also motivate new theories of play that could defeat past strategies. Or if no one can come up with ways to defeat AlphaGo it may indicate the valuation function it produces is approaching ideal. But AlphaGo is very much about combining existing tools of ConvNet and MCTS, albeit in a highly innovative manner, to solve the search problem of Go. Its success or failure could teach us a lot about how amenable the Go game is to such an approach (and potentially advance theories about the Go game), more than I would say about how in general problems in AI can be solved. That is what is learned here is very specific because Go is a very visual game and/or humans play it in a very visual way to take advantage of the massive parallelism of our vision system to quickly narrow down choices.
  - uremog 11y ago
    For those wondering about komi: Standard komi is 6.5 points under the Japanese and Korean rules; under Chinese, Ing and AGA rules standard komi is 7.5 points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komidashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komidashi

by fspeech 11y ago

empath75 11y ago

> If AlphaGo eventually beats humans at go I think it says more about the game (or the way humans play the game) than about AI in general. AI problems are always mysterious until they're solved. People say this sort of thing every time an AI achieves some task which had previously been deemed impossible.

romaniv 11y ago
There is another way of saying the same thing. A lot of seemingly groundbreaking progress in AI usually happens when people (people, not machines) discover a clever way of mapping a new unsolved problem to another - well-solved - problem. That's a valid and insightful observation that you shouldn't dismiss with such an ease.
- empath75 11y ago
  Why 'seemingly'? Why is that not 'actual' groundbreaking progress? The achievement of any level of AI will by necessity require the chaining together of processes which are not themselves 'intelligent'. It has to be bootstrapped somehow. On the day they build a walking, talking AI who can converse fully with a human, write a symphony, design a building, feel and express emotions and all the rest of the things we define as being essentially in the domain of humain intelligence, everyone will say, "But of course, none of those things required intelligence at all. This is all an elaborate collection of illusions and ugly hacks." And they'll be right, but I suspect that the brain is the same way.
  - romaniv 11y ago
    Why 'seemingly'? Why is that not 'actual' groundbreaking progress? Because mapping problems to pre-existing algorithms is bread and butter of computer science and software engineering. To be groundbreaking a work needs to change our understanding of the underlying issues. In a lot of popularized cases that does not happen.
  - arthur_pryor 11y ago
    i tend to agree with that. it does seem like there's some general instinct in people that other things (animals, "artificially" intelligent machines) could possess human-like intelligence and subjective experience. i mean, we both seem to be tacitly agreeing to that here. there's also obviously a general instinct that's completely the opposite, and i'd guess that's probably the more prevalent instinct (in the population at large and in many conflicted individuals). i think the opinion that humans are less special than we once thought, especially on expansive time scales, will only become more widespread.
Almaviva 11y ago
> AI problems are always mysterious until they're solved. There's truth there but this line is over-used. Playing chess better than a human was never deemed impossible and the ultimate solution doesn't seem to have any crazy insights that would stun a researcher from the 1960s. (You can read the source for Stockfish which is state of the art and open source). The improvements came in the form of more and more horsepower through hardware, more and more efficient innovations in the tree search very specific to the game of chess (bit board representation, move ordering), and simplifying evaluation and tweaking parameters according to unsupervised learning. Correct me if I'm wrong? At the end of the day, chess (and go) are discrete games with perfect information played one turn at a time according to a tree of simple and trivially determined possible moves with clear criteria for winning. I don't see why we'd put this on a pedestal as the example of something generally considered uniquely human, so we'd better expand our imaginations of what we can achieve with AI. As the parent said, the mistake may have been in supposing there wasn't a solvable evaluation function for Go positions when in fact, through some more human ingenuity, there is.
- taneq 11y ago
  So what happens if (when?) we come up with a system that does everything a human can do, better than a human, but doesn't contain any 'crazy insights', just a bunch of incremental improvements on what we have now? Does that mean we aren't intelligent? Or does it mean that the system isn't intelligent but that we are "because we do it differently"? Or do we accept at that point that intelligence is composed of simple building blocks interacting in complex ways (which we already know, if we eschew Cartesian duelism)?
  - argonaut 11y ago
    We would declare it intelligent? Certainly the people of today would call it intelligent. What I suspect you are claiming is that the people of that future would not call it intelligent, and this is the basis for arguing why that objection is not valid today. But that extrapolation to the future is just your speculation.
  - Scarblac 11y ago
argonaut 11y ago
The fact that people in the past have used the line "that's not really intelligence" doesn't at all invalidate the point that is being made, which is that games like Go/Chess/etc. have little to do with the real world. The real world is exponentially harder than those games (imperfect info, imperfect sensors, infinite state space, large - if not infinite - possible moves, infinite time horizon).

joe_the_user 11y ago

If AlphaGo eventually beats humans at go I think it says more about the game (or the way humans play the game) than about AI in general. I'd agree with the rest of your post but this statement seems to imply there's some "general level" that can't reached by the incremental approaches that yielded the results. The progress that we see here is incremental progress in a defined area but it's also progress towards more general and easier to implement approach - it's yet "point and solve" but it might be a step toward "point and solve". Given little "general intelligence" is understood, no one can say now for certain we won't arrive at it through a series of these advances.

fspeech 11y ago
Let me expand a little more on what I meant and see if it makes more sense to you: Much about Go/Weiqi is still unknown even to the top players. For example Ke Jie (the current highest ranked player) feels that the current komi (compensation given to white for playing second) is too generous and he prefers white (last year he won almost all his white games). This is why professional players seem very excited about AlphaGo. If AlphaGo can consistently beat top players it may teach us more about the game. It may discover or settle questions about josekis (pattern conventions). It may tell us what komi is fair. It could settle questions about how a particular board position should be valued. On the other hand since it uses patterns learned from human plays, this could also motivate new theories of play that could defeat past strategies. Or if no one can come up with ways to defeat AlphaGo it may indicate the valuation function it produces is approaching ideal. But AlphaGo is very much about combining existing tools of ConvNet and MCTS, albeit in a highly innovative manner, to solve the search problem of Go. Its success or failure could teach us a lot about how amenable the Go game is to such an approach (and potentially advance theories about the Go game), more than I would say about how in general problems in AI can be solved. That is what is learned here is very specific because Go is a very visual game and/or humans play it in a very visual way to take advantage of the massive parallelism of our vision system to quickly narrow down choices.
- uremog 11y ago
  For those wondering about komi: Standard komi is 6.5 points under the Japanese and Korean rules; under Chinese, Ing and AGA rules standard komi is 7.5 points https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komidashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komidashi