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Skeptics have said that achieving this milestone would not happen within this decade, our lifetimes or even ever. It happened yesterday. It took Lee Sedol many

Skeptics have said that achieving this milestone would not happen within this decade, our lifetimes or even ever. It happened yesterday. It took Lee Sedol many decades of his life to train to achieve this level. And his ability to pass on his skills is limited. Now that a computer has achieved this level, the state of the neural network behind it can be serialized and ran into an unlimited number of computers and have millions of systems that are more proficient at Go than the best player in the world. People have said that achieving the cognitive level of the human brain requires to match its computational power. But if you take out all the parasympathetic and motor boilerplate, what is actually left for mental tasks is much less from that, most of that power is not even recruited for higher level mental tasks. That lowers the bar for strong AI. Then, strong AI can be immortal, and never physically deteriorate from aging. Strong AI can multiply infinitely and communicate at a rate that would be equivalent to writing millions of books in a second. It could transfer all its knowledge in seconds. It can also recursively improve itself. This advantage will lower the bar for strong AI even more.

doktrin 11y ago
> Skeptics have said that achieving this milestone would not happen within this decade, our lifetimes or even ever. Did any credible skeptics actually claim this would never happen? If so, I'd love to hear their reasoning.
- partycoder 11y ago
  Enough people is skeptical about AI to make it a problem. Now, being more specific about Go: - Lee Sedol himself was confident he would win. - Ke Jie said he would win against AlphaGo. I think he would lose too.
  - the_af 11y ago
    Though it's true many people were skeptical about an AI winning at Go played at this level, I think people are mostly skeptical about general AI, not about algorithms that win at playing board games. It's different to be skeptical about specialized AI than about general AI.
    - partycoder 11y ago
      It took life millions of years of evolution to produce us. Look at what artificial intelligence has achieved in decades.
      - nzonbi 11y ago
        General AI could be the biggest ever discovery for humanity. But it will never be if we don't put a hard enough effort. The bad thing, is that economy laws seem to assign a limited effort toward it. In my opinion we should be trying harder. Worth mentioning is OpenAI (https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/), an effort by Y Combinator, Elon Musk and others. Brilliant initiative.
        partycoder 11y ago
        Overpopulation and the deterioration of the environment will push us to find solutions through AI.
        platz 11y ago
        environment is an issue, but I think the overpopulation card is overplayed and controversial
        mikeash 11y ago
        Overpopulation in terms of running out of space is definitely overplayed. But it's a direct multiplier for our effect on the environment. If the world's population were cut in half, we'd emit about half as much pollution, half as much greenhouse gas, half the land used for farming would be left wild, etc.
        fma 11y ago
        Not necessarily...carbon emissions per capita is not constant around the globe. Energy use is skewed towards modern countries, i.e United States. If you wiped out the 300 million people in the US, you would save more on carbon emissions than wiping out 300 million in China. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
- ghaff 11y ago
  Certainly a lot of people ten years ago would have bet against this happening by 2016--especially before Monte Carlo approaches were tried. But I doubt you would have found many takers for betting against it happening in a 100 years (much less it never happening). Autonomous vehicles are similar. IMO, it would be a fool's bet to bet against them ever happening. But it's reasonable to debate whether they'll be mainstream Level 4 consumer devices in 10 years, 25 years, or 50 years.
- VikingCoder 11y ago
  A neural network beating a top human at Go? Cripes, if Marvin Minsky didn't say it would never happen, I'd be stunned.
  - phire 11y ago
    Technically, it's two neural networks, each calculating reasonably simple functions (an estimate of the value of a board position and an estimate of which moves might be good) combined with a tree search algorithm.
return0 11y ago
On the other hand i would like to read an assessment of the significance of this advance. While AI may have perfect applicability to these perfect information games, we may still be decades from useful real world generic applications.
- partycoder 11y ago
  It is good enough now to replace millions of jobs. Transportation, retail, press, trading, etc. It is also good enough to put it in a combat drone that visually recognizes objectives and people. This can be all commanded by a small group of people, anonymously, and detached from accountability and without casualties.
  - scarmig 11y ago
    Well, no casualties among the people ordering the AI. Kids going to their aunties' wedding, a bit less so. To say nothing of the casualties that'll be inflected on the AI warriors...
    - hutzlibu 11y ago
      I guess, he was aware of that ...
- nzonbi 11y ago
  In my opinion a possible path is to make some sort of Symbolic AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...) system, and put machine learning on top, and even below of it. You could start with a very basic Symbolic AI, easier to understand. Then growth it gradually. The cool thing of this approach, would be that you could inspect the symbolic system to get a glance at how the AI system is thinking. Obviously a purely neuronal system can also do the trick. That is how the human brain works. But it would be great to make a system based on a symbolic AI, because it could be very interesting to observe its inner working. And it would also be possible to interact with it at the symbolic level.
seiji 11y ago
strong AI can be immortal My grandfather was very racist and never changed as long as he lived. I'm glad most people aren't immortal. There's no guarantee a full AI wouldn't be tempted by evil and just become republican (or worse, a VC). It can also recursively improve itself. So can people (the more you know, the more you can learn), but most don't. It's important to remember "intelligence" isn't an abstract concept—intelligence is also embodied in personality—and personalities have wishes and goals and desires and loves and hates and that one song they can't get out of their head. A true "strong AI" will be fully conscious, not just algorithmic function bating. Good luck telling a mildly strong godform to stop tripping on youtube videos and instead solve the global economic stability equation over lunch. This advantage will lower the bar for strong AI even more. That's kinda foofy conjecture. Being good at rectangular grid outcomes isn't necessarily a step in any direction towards a hands-off tax evaluating robot. It feels really really good to talk about how AI will be a hundred billion trillion times smarter than the combined brainpower of all humans that have ever lived, but it feels good in the same way thinking dead people live again after they die feels good—it triggers that warm wishful thinking parietal lobe that removes a bit of reason for the sake of an overarching calmness. Enthusiasm is great, but tempering with real expectations and less technopriesthood is better.
- nzonbi 11y ago
  In the grand scheme of things, what is the point of humans repeating billion of times the same cycle?: born, grow, learn, achieve some things, have some fun, and die. It is awesome a few times. But it is worth to repeat and repeat that for ever? Not if there is a much better option: The singularity. It has the potential to enhance the human race in formidable ways. Yes,there is the risk that the AI may chose to destroy us. But in my opinion is a bet that we should take. Just try our best to not be destroyed in the way. But we shouldn't leave this opportunity unexplored. It would be the biggest achievement of humanity.
  - armitron 11y ago
    You are assigning value to "us" beyond what might actually be there. What if our only evolutionary value is to give rise to machine intelligence [that will go on to explore the universe] and die off? We are primitive forms of life after all and are at the point where we should be able to say, with certainty, that machine intelligence will be objectively superior and something that we should feel OBLIGATED to give rise to, regardless of consequences.
aprescott 11y ago
It's worth remembering that AlphaGo was partially, initially trained on the previous game records of professional players, to form the basis of its policy network and so on. AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol is impressive, but it does rest on the combined total experience and long study of humans. That's why it's even more exciting to me to hear that one of the DeepMind team's next efforts will be to see how AlphaGo plays when it starts learning "from scratch".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- keehun 11y ago
  I agree with the excitement. A possible outcome is that the AlphaGo trained "from scratch" will not be as strong--but another possibility is that by eschewing any bias for human tradition, perhaps it will come up with even better strategies that no one has thought of before.
- seanwilson 11y ago
  Can anyone elaborate on how they would teach it from scratch? Would this mean only giving it the ability to play valid moves (and against itself) and give it access to the final score?
  - eru 11y ago
    Basically. They'd start with random moves. That worked with backgammon without any problems. (http://www.bkgm.com/articles/tesauro/tdl.html http://www.bkgm.com/articles/tesauro/tdl.html) In Go, a naive approach would probably also work, but would take ages. There's probably a slightly smarter approach possible.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  This was my argument against the StarCraft claim. If it wins, it will likely have just imitated human pros' thousands to millions of games like a smarter version of old chatterbots. Whereas, good human players learned as they went with far fewer matches, trial and error, planning, and learning from pto games sometimes. We can even go from Age of Empires to Starcraft with little prrparation and still do OK.

doktrin 11y ago

> Skeptics have said that achieving this milestone would not happen within this decade, our lifetimes or even ever. Did any credible skeptics actually claim this would never happen? If so, I'd love to hear their reasoning.

partycoder 11y ago
Enough people is skeptical about AI to make it a problem. Now, being more specific about Go: - Lee Sedol himself was confident he would win. - Ke Jie said he would win against AlphaGo. I think he would lose too.
- the_af 11y ago
  Though it's true many people were skeptical about an AI winning at Go played at this level, I think people are mostly skeptical about general AI, not about algorithms that win at playing board games. It's different to be skeptical about specialized AI than about general AI.
  - partycoder 11y ago
    It took life millions of years of evolution to produce us. Look at what artificial intelligence has achieved in decades.
    - nzonbi 11y ago
      General AI could be the biggest ever discovery for humanity. But it will never be if we don't put a hard enough effort. The bad thing, is that economy laws seem to assign a limited effort toward it. In my opinion we should be trying harder. Worth mentioning is OpenAI (https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/), an effort by Y Combinator, Elon Musk and others. Brilliant initiative.
      - partycoder 11y ago
        Overpopulation and the deterioration of the environment will push us to find solutions through AI.
        platz 11y ago
        environment is an issue, but I think the overpopulation card is overplayed and controversial
        mikeash 11y ago
        Overpopulation in terms of running out of space is definitely overplayed. But it's a direct multiplier for our effect on the environment. If the world's population were cut in half, we'd emit about half as much pollution, half as much greenhouse gas, half the land used for farming would be left wild, etc.
        fma 11y ago
        Not necessarily...carbon emissions per capita is not constant around the globe. Energy use is skewed towards modern countries, i.e United States. If you wiped out the 300 million people in the US, you would save more on carbon emissions than wiping out 300 million in China. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
ghaff 11y ago
Certainly a lot of people ten years ago would have bet against this happening by 2016--especially before Monte Carlo approaches were tried. But I doubt you would have found many takers for betting against it happening in a 100 years (much less it never happening). Autonomous vehicles are similar. IMO, it would be a fool's bet to bet against them ever happening. But it's reasonable to debate whether they'll be mainstream Level 4 consumer devices in 10 years, 25 years, or 50 years.
VikingCoder 11y ago
A neural network beating a top human at Go? Cripes, if Marvin Minsky didn't say it would never happen, I'd be stunned.
- phire 11y ago
  Technically, it's two neural networks, each calculating reasonably simple functions (an estimate of the value of a board position and an estimate of which moves might be good) combined with a tree search algorithm.

return0 11y ago

On the other hand i would like to read an assessment of the significance of this advance. While AI may have perfect applicability to these perfect information games, we may still be decades from useful real world generic applications.

partycoder 11y ago
It is good enough now to replace millions of jobs. Transportation, retail, press, trading, etc. It is also good enough to put it in a combat drone that visually recognizes objectives and people. This can be all commanded by a small group of people, anonymously, and detached from accountability and without casualties.
- scarmig 11y ago
  Well, no casualties among the people ordering the AI. Kids going to their aunties' wedding, a bit less so. To say nothing of the casualties that'll be inflected on the AI warriors...
  - hutzlibu 11y ago
    I guess, he was aware of that ...
nzonbi 11y ago
In my opinion a possible path is to make some sort of Symbolic AI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...) system, and put machine learning on top, and even below of it. You could start with a very basic Symbolic AI, easier to understand. Then growth it gradually. The cool thing of this approach, would be that you could inspect the symbolic system to get a glance at how the AI system is thinking. Obviously a purely neuronal system can also do the trick. That is how the human brain works. But it would be great to make a system based on a symbolic AI, because it could be very interesting to observe its inner working. And it would also be possible to interact with it at the symbolic level.

seiji 11y ago

strong AI can be immortal My grandfather was very racist and never changed as long as he lived. I'm glad most people aren't immortal. There's no guarantee a full AI wouldn't be tempted by evil and just become republican (or worse, a VC). It can also recursively improve itself. So can people (the more you know, the more you can learn), but most don't. It's important to remember "intelligence" isn't an abstract concept—intelligence is also embodied in personality—and personalities have wishes and goals and desires and loves and hates and that one song they can't get out of their head. A true "strong AI" will be fully conscious, not just algorithmic function bating. Good luck telling a mildly strong godform to stop tripping on youtube videos and instead solve the global economic stability equation over lunch. This advantage will lower the bar for strong AI even more. That's kinda foofy conjecture. Being good at rectangular grid outcomes isn't necessarily a step in any direction towards a hands-off tax evaluating robot. It feels really really good to talk about how AI will be a hundred billion trillion times smarter than the combined brainpower of all humans that have ever lived, but it feels good in the same way thinking dead people live again after they die feels good—it triggers that warm wishful thinking parietal lobe that removes a bit of reason for the sake of an overarching calmness. Enthusiasm is great, but tempering with real expectations and less technopriesthood is better.

nzonbi 11y ago
In the grand scheme of things, what is the point of humans repeating billion of times the same cycle?: born, grow, learn, achieve some things, have some fun, and die. It is awesome a few times. But it is worth to repeat and repeat that for ever? Not if there is a much better option: The singularity. It has the potential to enhance the human race in formidable ways. Yes,there is the risk that the AI may chose to destroy us. But in my opinion is a bet that we should take. Just try our best to not be destroyed in the way. But we shouldn't leave this opportunity unexplored. It would be the biggest achievement of humanity.
- armitron 11y ago
  You are assigning value to "us" beyond what might actually be there. What if our only evolutionary value is to give rise to machine intelligence [that will go on to explore the universe] and die off? We are primitive forms of life after all and are at the point where we should be able to say, with certainty, that machine intelligence will be objectively superior and something that we should feel OBLIGATED to give rise to, regardless of consequences.

aprescott 11y ago

It's worth remembering that AlphaGo was partially, initially trained on the previous game records of professional players, to form the basis of its policy network and so on. AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol is impressive, but it does rest on the combined total experience and long study of humans. That's why it's even more exciting to me to hear that one of the DeepMind team's next efforts will be to see how AlphaGo plays when it starts learning "from scratch".

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
keehun 11y ago
I agree with the excitement. A possible outcome is that the AlphaGo trained "from scratch" will not be as strong--but another possibility is that by eschewing any bias for human tradition, perhaps it will come up with even better strategies that no one has thought of before.
seanwilson 11y ago
Can anyone elaborate on how they would teach it from scratch? Would this mean only giving it the ability to play valid moves (and against itself) and give it access to the final score?
- eru 11y ago
  Basically. They'd start with random moves. That worked with backgammon without any problems. (http://www.bkgm.com/articles/tesauro/tdl.html http://www.bkgm.com/articles/tesauro/tdl.html) In Go, a naive approach would probably also work, but would take ages. There's probably a slightly smarter approach possible.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
This was my argument against the StarCraft claim. If it wins, it will likely have just imitated human pros' thousands to millions of games like a smarter version of old chatterbots. Whereas, good human players learned as they went with far fewer matches, trial and error, planning, and learning from pto games sometimes. We can even go from Age of Empires to Starcraft with little prrparation and still do OK.