5 ms·

Does playing Go and beating world champions count? That seemed a creative endeavor to me.

by golfer 10y ago

DougWebb 10y ago
I would say those are analytical, but not creative.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  As soon as a computer becomes better than the human (either best or average one) in something which was considered as a sign of intelligence, immediately texts will be written why this is not a sign of intelligence and why intelligence is something completely different. This repeats many times. The same holds for creativity. I have rather the impression that lots of people who write this kind of papers rather want some computer program who is just like them - just a little bit more clever or creative (call it narcissism) instead of some computer program that is "intelligent" or "creative". These people don't understand that one shouldn't judge a fish by its inability to climb a tree.
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    That may be, but it may also be that when computers become better than a human at something, that happened because we gained a greater understanding of how to make that happen, and that greater understanding is what leads us to stop considering it a sign of intelligence. Hero of Alexandria, who lived from 10AD to 70AD, is famous for his mechanical inventions. One that I recall was a mechanism that opened the doors to a temple when a fire was lit in a brazier outside. To the people of the time, who didn't understand mechanics, this was a sign of the gods and the everyday miracles they would perform. But to anyone who knew how it worked, it was a simple mechanism. A computer that plays a complex game, or creates art, or understands spoken queries and answers verbally, or identifies things in photos, or drives a car, seems like magic to most people. But to software developers who understand the algorithms behind those actions there's no magic, and no intelligence. It's just software. The promise, and claim, of AI boils down to this: that what's going on inside of our own heads is also just software. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. Even if it's true, there's no guarantee that equivalent software can be run on the artificial hardware we've produced. So yes, we keep raising the bar, but I think that's because we keep discovering that the bar was actually already higher than we thought it was.
    - golfer 10y ago
      Reference the AI effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
    well if intelligence is recognising and extrapolating from regular patterns in your sensorium, surely the AlphaGo system is rather intelligent; even just playing against the search-less pattern subsystems on the version that beat Fan Hui (way weaker than the one we saw in the Lee Sedol match by Google's internal ELO assesment) almost any non-professionals would get crushed. So it clearly learned a great deal from both go game records, and from experience of playing. But isn't a question of creativity rather different from the matter of intelligence? I'd love to see recommendations on papers that try to formalize creative AI systems -- but I'd expect something with less focus on exploitation and more on exploration than a goal-directed game engine. Maybe using some novelty signals or the like. The fact that people redefine what AI whenever reached is is a valid point; but that does not mean one should lump all sistems into the same basket. Something like a pop music composing and light novel/screenplay writing bot at least seems like a doable goal, yes, but it def isn't AlphaGo.
- tim333 10y ago
  Move 37 game 2 by AlphaGo against Sedol: >But at the same time, those of us who watched the match inside Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel could feel the beauty of that one move, especially after talking to the infectiously philosophical Fan Hui. “So beautiful,” he kept saying. “So beautiful.” (Fan Gui is the three-time European Go champion) If any human played that move it would be described as very creative. https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-redefined-future/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-re...
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    That's a human emotional response to an observation. We do it all of the time; we see beauty in landscapes, grace in the movements of animals, peace and tranquility in the sounds of a babbling brook. None of these are really out there in the world; they're reflections of our own minds upon nature. A human player might have made that move in a burst of creative inspiration. Or they might have made it after careful analytical deliberation. Or it could have been random desperation. If they don't say why they did it, observers are free to interpret it any way they like. That has no bearing on what actually happened.
WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
hm, used to be said for chess too; a uniquely human creative skill.. I love the Go algorithm (there's 3 basic ones in there really), but no aspect of it seems creative. To try to see it in a grossly simplified step by step fashion: in the abstract, does seem similar to how a human would think of the game though; consider promising moves, where promising is some fuzzy intuition based on the pattern of the board -> for each of those, read how the responses might look like (which the computer does way way more than the human), and what you discover using this suggests other promising moves -> and at some depth of each such read, evaluate the board position; who looks ahead, which too is some fuzzy-ish intuition based on the board patern (though there are various heuristics humans would use when learning this). Computer also evaluates further, a number of fast playouts to the end and mixes this with that pattern-based evaluation. Is this the kind of thought process you'd associate with creativity? Seems search-based, analytic and strategic; only funny thing is how evaluations are pattern-based nebulous things, but that seems an implementation detail. In some situations, you may come up with evaluation procedures like say material advantage in chess and code the relevant decision procedure, in others, you'd "code" the decision procedure implicitly, by specifying a dataset that exemplifies the desired function, and use statistics to come up with that function. Increases the kinds of decisions you can implement tremendously as you can leverage implicit rather than just explicit knowledge, yes -- but conceptually kinda the same.

Does playing Go and beating world champions count? That seemed a creative endeavor to me.

by golfer 10y ago

Does playing Go and beating world champions count? That seemed a creative endeavor to me.

DougWebb 10y ago

I would say those are analytical, but not creative.

wolfgke 10y ago
As soon as a computer becomes better than the human (either best or average one) in something which was considered as a sign of intelligence, immediately texts will be written why this is not a sign of intelligence and why intelligence is something completely different. This repeats many times. The same holds for creativity. I have rather the impression that lots of people who write this kind of papers rather want some computer program who is just like them - just a little bit more clever or creative (call it narcissism) instead of some computer program that is "intelligent" or "creative". These people don't understand that one shouldn't judge a fish by its inability to climb a tree.
- DougWebb 10y ago
  That may be, but it may also be that when computers become better than a human at something, that happened because we gained a greater understanding of how to make that happen, and that greater understanding is what leads us to stop considering it a sign of intelligence. Hero of Alexandria, who lived from 10AD to 70AD, is famous for his mechanical inventions. One that I recall was a mechanism that opened the doors to a temple when a fire was lit in a brazier outside. To the people of the time, who didn't understand mechanics, this was a sign of the gods and the everyday miracles they would perform. But to anyone who knew how it worked, it was a simple mechanism. A computer that plays a complex game, or creates art, or understands spoken queries and answers verbally, or identifies things in photos, or drives a car, seems like magic to most people. But to software developers who understand the algorithms behind those actions there's no magic, and no intelligence. It's just software. The promise, and claim, of AI boils down to this: that what's going on inside of our own heads is also just software. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. Even if it's true, there's no guarantee that equivalent software can be run on the artificial hardware we've produced. So yes, we keep raising the bar, but I think that's because we keep discovering that the bar was actually already higher than we thought it was.
  - golfer 10y ago
    Reference the AI effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
  well if intelligence is recognising and extrapolating from regular patterns in your sensorium, surely the AlphaGo system is rather intelligent; even just playing against the search-less pattern subsystems on the version that beat Fan Hui (way weaker than the one we saw in the Lee Sedol match by Google's internal ELO assesment) almost any non-professionals would get crushed. So it clearly learned a great deal from both go game records, and from experience of playing. But isn't a question of creativity rather different from the matter of intelligence? I'd love to see recommendations on papers that try to formalize creative AI systems -- but I'd expect something with less focus on exploitation and more on exploration than a goal-directed game engine. Maybe using some novelty signals or the like. The fact that people redefine what AI whenever reached is is a valid point; but that does not mean one should lump all sistems into the same basket. Something like a pop music composing and light novel/screenplay writing bot at least seems like a doable goal, yes, but it def isn't AlphaGo.
tim333 10y ago
Move 37 game 2 by AlphaGo against Sedol: >But at the same time, those of us who watched the match inside Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel could feel the beauty of that one move, especially after talking to the infectiously philosophical Fan Hui. “So beautiful,” he kept saying. “So beautiful.” (Fan Gui is the three-time European Go champion) If any human played that move it would be described as very creative. https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-redefined-future/ https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-re...
- DougWebb 10y ago
  That's a human emotional response to an observation. We do it all of the time; we see beauty in landscapes, grace in the movements of animals, peace and tranquility in the sounds of a babbling brook. None of these are really out there in the world; they're reflections of our own minds upon nature. A human player might have made that move in a burst of creative inspiration. Or they might have made it after careful analytical deliberation. Or it could have been random desperation. If they don't say why they did it, observers are free to interpret it any way they like. That has no bearing on what actually happened.

WilliamDhalgren 10y ago

hm, used to be said for chess too; a uniquely human creative skill.. I love the Go algorithm (there's 3 basic ones in there really), but no aspect of it seems creative. To try to see it in a grossly simplified step by step fashion: in the abstract, does seem similar to how a human would think of the game though; consider promising moves, where promising is some fuzzy intuition based on the pattern of the board -> for each of those, read how the responses might look like (which the computer does way way more than the human), and what you discover using this suggests other promising moves -> and at some depth of each such read, evaluate the board position; who looks ahead, which too is some fuzzy-ish intuition based on the board patern (though there are various heuristics humans would use when learning this). Computer also evaluates further, a number of fast playouts to the end and mixes this with that pattern-based evaluation. Is this the kind of thought process you'd associate with creativity? Seems search-based, analytic and strategic; only funny thing is how evaluations are pattern-based nebulous things, but that seems an implementation detail. In some situations, you may come up with evaluation procedures like say material advantage in chess and code the relevant decision procedure, in others, you'd "code" the decision procedure implicitly, by specifying a dataset that exemplifies the desired function, and use statistics to come up with that function. Increases the kinds of decisions you can implement tremendously as you can leverage implicit rather than just explicit knowledge, yes -- but conceptually kinda the same.