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Like most articles about AlphaGo this one does not mention two (uncomfortable for many) facts. 1. AlphaGo doesn't just use neural networks. If it did, it would
by colllectorof 11y ago
Like most articles about AlphaGo this one does not mention two (uncomfortable for many) facts.
1. AlphaGo doesn't just use neural networks. If it did, it would almost certainly loose 0-5. It also uses Monte-Carlo tree search, which is an algorithms that made a huge leap in the strength of Go bots. The rub is that MCTS is a flavor of "brute-force" algorithm. What does that tell you about the nature of Go?
2. None of the individual components in AlphaGo are theoretically novel. In fact, all of them are very well-known: conv. nets, MCTS, data-mining, reinforcement learning. What does that tell you about the nature of this particular game-playing AI compared to its many brethren?
(By the way, I wonder how many of the journalists praising Google for Alpha Go even heard of Rémi Coulom. Shouldn't he be at least be mentioned somewhere in all these articles?)
- unexistance 11y agohttps://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it-works/ https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it... somewhat answers your question, tho with questionable analogy to the human mind
- Houshalter 11y agoI don't see anything wrong with them using existing tech. Most technology is iterative. It's like saying going to the moon isn't impressive because rockets are 20 year old tech. NNs have shown a lot of promise in the last few years. They are just starting to make their way to new applications like Go playing. So in that sense AlphaGo is a sign of things to come.
- argonaut 11y agoNot a great analogy, because during the Space Race, hundreds of technologies were invented. Google would be hard-pressed to patent any of the specific component technologies in AlphaGo, if they wished to.
- colllectorof 11y ago> NNs have shown a lot of promise in the last few years. Which is interesting in its own right, since ANNs have been the subject of research for more than half a century. If anything, all their ups and downs should make people more cautious about bold predictions.
- gcp 11y agoMonte Carlo Go was also known and researched for a long while before the breakthrough came in 2006 (how to combine it with tree search).
- chongli 11y agoRockets are nearly a millennium old technology. Having said that, it's not all that impressive that rockets are able to go to the moon: that's what we built them to do! It'd be far more impressive if AlphaGo somehow built a rocket all by itself and went to the moon because they has nothing to do with what it was built for. That's the thing: AlphaGo is more like a rocket than it is like us. It can play a game better than all of us but it can't do anything else.
- gcp 11y agoThanks for writing this out - you're 100% right. A ton of the strength came from tree search. DCNN are strong but they do not beat professionals yet. They can guide the tree search well, though. The paper about AlphaGo is really disappointing in some ways. Even Facebook's Go/AI research paper had more novel techniques in it. But 2 dudes fiddling at Facebook aren't going to beat a dedicated team of 20+ with a PR mission to fulfill...