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This news has flewn way under the radar in comparison to the previous Match. Cho Chikun is a legendary player ,and was top of the world in the 70's. From that

This news has flewn way under the radar in comparison to the previous Match. Cho Chikun is a legendary player ,and was top of the world in the 70's. From that era, along with Takemiya Masaki, he was one of the only ones that kept playing and kept winning titles even in his old age. The style of 70's players was artistic and not as sports-like as koreans were when they rose in the 90's. They always showed a higher level of philosophy and art in game, but it was ultimately crushed by the "machine-like" tactical capacity of korean players. Cho chikun has very little chance to beat Lee sedol. But he was confident on beating Zen, and he did something unspeakable in the LeeSedol Matches: he came back from a losing game, from a machine that looked that would never relent its edges. As a retired semi-professional Go player that learnt by replaying games from Cho Chikun, it is exciting to see the Japenese artistic and humane vision dominate the computer over the Korean Tactical sports-minded way.

espadrine 10y ago
Isn't it plausible that DeepZenGo simply isn't at the level of play of AlphaGo? Facebook's DarkForest is also a competent AI, but even it does not compete yet.
- gcp 10y ago
  It's hard to compare, as even Deep Zen runs on much more...modest...hardware than the match version of AlphaGo did. It's conceivable that AlphaGo would get clobbered on Zen's hardware, or that Zen would clobber AlphaGo if that team had Google-eseque resources available. But there's no reason to believe we'd ever see such a fair comparison. It makes no sense for either team! Zen is commercial software sold to people with a normal PC, so obviously reaching AlphaGo performance on AlphaGo hardware does their customers no good either. It's for sure stronger than Darkforest. Some free PC programs like Leela have reached Darkforest levels on normal PC hardware (Darkforest used 44 NVIDIA Tesla cards, Leela uses a single normal "gaming" GPU), and Zen is several stones stronger than Leela.
  - sams99 10y ago
    "Zen is commercial software sold to people with a normal PC" Note, it looks like only version 6 is out: https://book.mynavi.jp/ec/products/detail/id=62646 https://book.mynavi.jp/ec/products/detail/id=62646 It appears that DeepZen would be a new version that is not quite yet released to the public.
- tasuki 10y ago
  Not just plausible, it's pretty damn sure. Still, major props to Hideki Kato, who's developing cutting edge AI at the age of 62. I wish to have his drive at that age!
  - gcp 10y ago
    Not just plausible, it's pretty damn sure. Your certainty is based on what data?
    - cybertronic 10y ago
      https://www.goratings.org/ https://www.goratings.org/
      - gcp 10y ago
        A rating based on 3 games has a pretty high (read: enormous) error margin.
    - WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
      A rather similar hardware with a recent version of the same program plays on the KGS server. Seems to be about what would be 10d and is among the top players on the server (was 1., now seems to be 3.). You can see the graph of its playstrength; its quite impressive to see the gains Zen got from implementing ValueNet (and previously with PolicyNet) really. https://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=Zen19K2 https://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=Zen19K2 Hardware for ZenK2 was given on computer-go mailinglist: Zen19K2's information is ------------------------------------- Computer program Zen running on KURISU server provided by DWANGO. CPU: Xeon E5-2623 v3 x2 GPU: GeForce GTX TITAN X x4 http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-October/009587.html http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-October/00... author of Zen gave the hardware behind this match, in a post to the same mailinglist as: http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-November/009612.html http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-November/0... CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2699v4 (44 cores/2.2 GHz) GPU: 4 x nVidia Titan X (Pascal ) RAM: 128GB So rather similar. ~10d is way way lower than what AlphaGo had to be to play on par with one of the top players of Go. Pro ranks start around or just above the KGS 9d (which is around what a 7d rank would be for regular amateurs in most world amateur organisations). A rough approximation is that you can take 3-4 pro ranks for each dan rank/stone of handicap (well, to the extent one can even approximate strength by the rank, as a rank once won is kept for life, so as you age and young pro players pass you by, your rating is getting inflated). So apriori you could expect Zen to play around middling pro ranks, and maybe around the strength of the v13 of AlphaGo, the one that beat Fan Hui, and described in the Nature paper. And that's about what his play with Chikun indicates as well. Cho Chikun's rating is 3239, while Lee Sedol's is 3508. so around 300 elo difference, which seems a conservative estimate of the difference scale (and the results of the two matches do indicate, if weakly, that the actual difference is even larger). A 230 point gap corresponds to a 79% probability of winning. For comparison, distributed AlphaGo v13, the one that played vs Fan Hui is 250 elo points stronger than a single machine version of the same version of AlphaGo. Also if that would carry any weight with you, you could just take it on the say-so of Myungwan Kim 9p, who was doing commentary on both DeepZen and AlphaGo matches. Really the difference in strength seems rather obvious to such a strong go player, as you can see in the way he criticized some DeepZen's moves, and how impressed he was with so many of AlphaGo's.
thomasahle 10y ago
Computers losing to Machines in Go is not yet that surprising. The article doesn't really give any reasons to why we should have expected something else. Perhaps the main news worthy part was that the machine actually won a game. But then we don't really know how strong its opponent is today.
- gcp 10y ago
  we don't really know how strong its opponent is today He's not exactly retired, you know: https://www.goratings.org/players/98.html https://www.goratings.org/players/98.html
gcp 10y ago
The news flies under the radar because for most people Go is now solved (compare to what happened after Deep Blue's win). There's a small blemish in that Ke Jie is still rated higher than AlphaGo. Perhaps they will rectify that, perhaps not. Cho Chikun had the large advantage over Lee Sedol that his opponent (Zen) and similar programs (Crazy Stone, Leela) are simply available for him to practice against and probe for weaknesses. Then of course there's also a significant reduction in the speed of the hardware. Both of those matter a lot. I won't make a firm statement how relevant the style argument is you mention, but really, don't underestimate those two.
- msbarnett 10y ago
  > The news flies under the radar because for most people Go is now solved (compare to what happened after Deep Blue's win). "Machines reaching a level of play that is consistently better than humans" and "the game is solved" are two completely different statements and it isn't particularly useful to conflate them. We will likely never be able to solve Go in the formal sense.
  - hkmurakami 10y ago
    The key though is "for most people". We live in a post-fact society, remember? ;)
    - andrewflnr 10y ago
      Quite. gcp is lamenting the same conflation as msbarnett.
    - rwallace 10y ago
      I don't think there is a factual disagreement here, just a terminology issue. Mathematical jargon is not quite the same language as plain English. In the former, 'solved' by default means you have found the mathematically perfect solution. In the latter, 'solved' by default just means you have found a solution good enough for practical purposes.
  - deleted 10y ago
nv-vn 10y ago
This sounds a lot like video games like StarCraft and Overwatch today. Korean competitive gamers have achieved the same kind of machine-like skill. In the Overwatch World Cup this year, not only did the Korean team go undefeated, but they massively crushed their opponents (even in the final game!).
- taejavu 10y ago
  There's even a joke that the currency of prize money for all international StarCraft tournaments should be the Korean Won.
convolvatron 10y ago
i play go, nowhere near the retired semi-professional level my backwater go community doesnt really care about computers because we're too focussed on trying not to be so lousy, and on the conversation. the light chase. i'm super curious...when you see alpha against sedol, or whatever this is against chikun. do you read something there? is there a character?
- conanbatt 10y ago
  About 4 years ago, a friend i know used a 3-4d level computer against me for a fraction of his game. I noticed something was off, i actually thought he was being substituted, but it didnt cross my mind it was a bot. However, it was a very tactical situation. Looking at alpha, something similar but at higher level happens: it looks so profoundly tactical that its hard to catch character from it. I can tell how Lee felt however: like i felt playing people close to his level, like you play a wall that you cant read.
chunsj 10y ago
Cho is a korean as well. Though I'm not sure on his current nationality. Yes, there might be some difference in the style of playing Go, which I do not know the detail.
- conanbatt 10y ago
  For the purposes of Go, he is japanese. He learnt Go from Kitani Minoru from age 5-6, and he became a professional player at 11~ breaking records for his time (if I recall correctly). Back in the 70's japan was everything for Go.

espadrine 10y ago

Isn't it plausible that DeepZenGo simply isn't at the level of play of AlphaGo? Facebook's DarkForest is also a competent AI, but even it does not compete yet.

gcp 10y ago
It's hard to compare, as even Deep Zen runs on much more...modest...hardware than the match version of AlphaGo did. It's conceivable that AlphaGo would get clobbered on Zen's hardware, or that Zen would clobber AlphaGo if that team had Google-eseque resources available. But there's no reason to believe we'd ever see such a fair comparison. It makes no sense for either team! Zen is commercial software sold to people with a normal PC, so obviously reaching AlphaGo performance on AlphaGo hardware does their customers no good either. It's for sure stronger than Darkforest. Some free PC programs like Leela have reached Darkforest levels on normal PC hardware (Darkforest used 44 NVIDIA Tesla cards, Leela uses a single normal "gaming" GPU), and Zen is several stones stronger than Leela.
- sams99 10y ago
  "Zen is commercial software sold to people with a normal PC" Note, it looks like only version 6 is out: https://book.mynavi.jp/ec/products/detail/id=62646 https://book.mynavi.jp/ec/products/detail/id=62646 It appears that DeepZen would be a new version that is not quite yet released to the public.
tasuki 10y ago
Not just plausible, it's pretty damn sure. Still, major props to Hideki Kato, who's developing cutting edge AI at the age of 62. I wish to have his drive at that age!
- gcp 10y ago
  Not just plausible, it's pretty damn sure. Your certainty is based on what data?
  - cybertronic 10y ago
    https://www.goratings.org/ https://www.goratings.org/
    - gcp 10y ago
      A rating based on 3 games has a pretty high (read: enormous) error margin.
  - WilliamDhalgren 10y ago
    A rather similar hardware with a recent version of the same program plays on the KGS server. Seems to be about what would be 10d and is among the top players on the server (was 1., now seems to be 3.). You can see the graph of its playstrength; its quite impressive to see the gains Zen got from implementing ValueNet (and previously with PolicyNet) really. https://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=Zen19K2 https://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=Zen19K2 Hardware for ZenK2 was given on computer-go mailinglist: Zen19K2's information is ------------------------------------- Computer program Zen running on KURISU server provided by DWANGO. CPU: Xeon E5-2623 v3 x2 GPU: GeForce GTX TITAN X x4 http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-October/009587.html http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-October/00... author of Zen gave the hardware behind this match, in a post to the same mailinglist as: http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-November/009612.html http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2016-November/0... CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2699v4 (44 cores/2.2 GHz) GPU: 4 x nVidia Titan X (Pascal ) RAM: 128GB So rather similar. ~10d is way way lower than what AlphaGo had to be to play on par with one of the top players of Go. Pro ranks start around or just above the KGS 9d (which is around what a 7d rank would be for regular amateurs in most world amateur organisations). A rough approximation is that you can take 3-4 pro ranks for each dan rank/stone of handicap (well, to the extent one can even approximate strength by the rank, as a rank once won is kept for life, so as you age and young pro players pass you by, your rating is getting inflated). So apriori you could expect Zen to play around middling pro ranks, and maybe around the strength of the v13 of AlphaGo, the one that beat Fan Hui, and described in the Nature paper. And that's about what his play with Chikun indicates as well. Cho Chikun's rating is 3239, while Lee Sedol's is 3508. so around 300 elo difference, which seems a conservative estimate of the difference scale (and the results of the two matches do indicate, if weakly, that the actual difference is even larger). A 230 point gap corresponds to a 79% probability of winning. For comparison, distributed AlphaGo v13, the one that played vs Fan Hui is 250 elo points stronger than a single machine version of the same version of AlphaGo. Also if that would carry any weight with you, you could just take it on the say-so of Myungwan Kim 9p, who was doing commentary on both DeepZen and AlphaGo matches. Really the difference in strength seems rather obvious to such a strong go player, as you can see in the way he criticized some DeepZen's moves, and how impressed he was with so many of AlphaGo's.

thomasahle 10y ago

Computers losing to Machines in Go is not yet that surprising. The article doesn't really give any reasons to why we should have expected something else. Perhaps the main news worthy part was that the machine actually won a game. But then we don't really know how strong its opponent is today.

gcp 10y ago
we don't really know how strong its opponent is today He's not exactly retired, you know: https://www.goratings.org/players/98.html https://www.goratings.org/players/98.html

gcp 10y ago

The news flies under the radar because for most people Go is now solved (compare to what happened after Deep Blue's win). There's a small blemish in that Ke Jie is still rated higher than AlphaGo. Perhaps they will rectify that, perhaps not. Cho Chikun had the large advantage over Lee Sedol that his opponent (Zen) and similar programs (Crazy Stone, Leela) are simply available for him to practice against and probe for weaknesses. Then of course there's also a significant reduction in the speed of the hardware. Both of those matter a lot. I won't make a firm statement how relevant the style argument is you mention, but really, don't underestimate those two.

msbarnett 10y ago
> The news flies under the radar because for most people Go is now solved (compare to what happened after Deep Blue's win). "Machines reaching a level of play that is consistently better than humans" and "the game is solved" are two completely different statements and it isn't particularly useful to conflate them. We will likely never be able to solve Go in the formal sense.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  The key though is "for most people". We live in a post-fact society, remember? ;)
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    Quite. gcp is lamenting the same conflation as msbarnett.
  - rwallace 10y ago
    I don't think there is a factual disagreement here, just a terminology issue. Mathematical jargon is not quite the same language as plain English. In the former, 'solved' by default means you have found the mathematically perfect solution. In the latter, 'solved' by default just means you have found a solution good enough for practical purposes.
- deleted 10y ago

nv-vn 10y ago

This sounds a lot like video games like StarCraft and Overwatch today. Korean competitive gamers have achieved the same kind of machine-like skill. In the Overwatch World Cup this year, not only did the Korean team go undefeated, but they massively crushed their opponents (even in the final game!).

taejavu 10y ago
There's even a joke that the currency of prize money for all international StarCraft tournaments should be the Korean Won.

convolvatron 10y ago

i play go, nowhere near the retired semi-professional level my backwater go community doesnt really care about computers because we're too focussed on trying not to be so lousy, and on the conversation. the light chase. i'm super curious...when you see alpha against sedol, or whatever this is against chikun. do you read something there? is there a character?

conanbatt 10y ago
About 4 years ago, a friend i know used a 3-4d level computer against me for a fraction of his game. I noticed something was off, i actually thought he was being substituted, but it didnt cross my mind it was a bot. However, it was a very tactical situation. Looking at alpha, something similar but at higher level happens: it looks so profoundly tactical that its hard to catch character from it. I can tell how Lee felt however: like i felt playing people close to his level, like you play a wall that you cant read.

chunsj 10y ago

Cho is a korean as well. Though I'm not sure on his current nationality. Yes, there might be some difference in the style of playing Go, which I do not know the detail.

conanbatt 10y ago
For the purposes of Go, he is japanese. He learnt Go from Kitani Minoru from age 5-6, and he became a professional player at 11~ breaking records for his time (if I recall correctly). Back in the 70's japan was everything for Go.