5 ms·

In the post-game press conference I think Lee Sedol said something like "Before the matches I was thinking the result would be 5-0 or 4-1 in my favor, but then

• dba7dba 11y ago
  I've read some articles in Korean press that suggested AlphaGo team picked Lee as their match and not Ke Jie (currently #1 ranked, 19 years young) because there's a lot more public records of Lee's plays over his much longer pro career (nearly 20 years now). Thus more material for AlphaGo to train with and against. So it's not totally arrogant of Ke Jie to suggest he could beat AlphaGo. AlphaGo has not much 'experience' in dealing with Ke Jie. And Lee winning of game 4 shows a human is still indeed more capable than any AI. He basically reprogrammed his game on his own. Sorta.
  • kybernetikos 11y ago
    That was specifically discussed in the after match conference today. Demis said that it wasn't trained specifically against Lee but was trained against strong amateurs on the Internet initially before playing against itself. He said that even if they'd wanted to, alpha go requires a much larger number of games than are available by Lee Seoul to train so it wouldn't have been possible anyway.
    • phatfish 11y ago
      It was discussed pre-match for game 2 or 3 as well, and Lee's games were described as "a drop in the ocean" I believe. Came up because of an assertion from the interviewer that chess AI had been trained against it's opponent specifically.
  • Angostura 11y ago
    Err, so if AlphaGo wins game 5, does that show 'an AI is still indeed more capable than any human?'
    • silasdavis 11y ago
      Exactly. The faint whiff of bullshit.
  • bluecalm 11y ago
    Another reason could be that Lee is a much bigger name in go than Ke Jie. Sure, Ke Jie is stronger now but Lee was a dominant/top player for a long long time.
  • CydeWeys 11y ago
    Ke Jie just happens to be #1 right now. Lee Sedol is more impressive in that he's been a world-class Go player for much longer. Twenty years from now, if Ke Jie is as dominant as Lee Sedol is now, then he'd be a good pick then. But either way it's not a big deal; there's not that much daylight between the two, so picking the more famous and well-known one to go up against is a safe bet. Personally I want to see a discussion game with the top Go experts (including both Lee Sedol and Ke Jie amongst others) competing against the next version of AlphaGo, in a game with much longer time limits.
    • fspeech 11y ago
      I don't think top pros view it that way. He is of a new generation that play thousands of games over the internet; that study the game socially, while Lee is much more a loner. Whether Ke Jie will dominate as much as Lee did will say more about the strength of his competitors than his strength vs Lee.
  • Cacti 11y ago
    Many of the reinforcement learning techniques require data sets in the billions to make much sense of it all. This is likely the reason why the AI had to play against itself so much, because there simply wasn't enough data in general, even including all recorded games. So Lee's games are sort of a drop in a bucket as far the performance of the AI goes.
• rwallace 11y ago
  Yep! As someone who was rooting for DeepMind, I like this result, for two reasons: Lee Sedol earned it - he's behaved like a true sportsman all the way - and it gives us some interesting information (yesterday we only had a lower bound on AlphaGo's strength; today we also have an upper bound).
  • vl 11y ago
    >yesterday we only had a lower bound on AlphaGo's strength; today we also have an upper bound I think it's premature, establishing bounds with good confidence interval requires tens or hundreds of games. Specifically, 3:2 result would be really inconclusive.
    • CydeWeys 11y ago
      The first data point tells you more about bounds than any individual subsequent data point. Knowing that a human can defeat AlphaGo is enormously important. To use an analogy, having confirmation of contact by even a single alien species would be hugely important, way more so than exactly nailing down the number of alien species. Knowing that something is even possible is oftentimes the most important aspect that needs to be ascertained, and contact (or a win, in Lee's case) does that unequivocally.
      • cLeEOGPw 11y ago
        At the time chess was "the" problem, humans could beat computer too from time to time. Now the chess is solved. Same will likely happen to go in the years to come. But the point of this was not the go itself. It was the demonstration of potential capabilities of neural network and other machine learning algorithms.
        • CydeWeys 11y ago
          Chess isn't solved. It's just that computers have gotten sufficiently better at it than humans that humans don't have a chance. If Chess were truly solved, then you wouldn't be able to make a new AI program that could do better than even odds against the existing ones. But that's not the case, and incremental advancements in Chess-playing programs are made all the time. There are even tournaments where Chess programs play each other. If Chess were solved, such a thing wouldn't make any sense, just like how there are no Tic-Tac-Toe tournaments because that game is solved.
• TrevorJ 11y ago
  Interesting point here: if you are the best Go player in the world, and you play against an AI that can beat you, it seems really possible that it makes you that much better. It would be interesting to see what the win ratio would be after match 10, match 50 or so on.