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Is AlphaGo really what we want to classify as 'intelligence'? It is a calculating engine – one which outperforms humans, to be sure, but no more intelligent tha

Is AlphaGo really what we want to classify as 'intelligence'? It is a calculating engine – one which outperforms humans, to be sure, but no more intelligent than a properly-wielded pocket calculator.

matt4077 10y ago
Yes – stuff like this is confusing 'intelligence' with 'sentience'. Playing go or chess would have been classified as activities clearly requiring intelligence in the recent past. We're just moving the goalpost whenever AI advances. At some point, it'll probably divide mankind into fractions which either want or don't want to grant certain rights to AI (possibly obsoleted by the great AI uprising of 2025-20-11 6:45:23am to 2025-20-11 6:45:25am)
- jacquesm 10y ago
  I don't think it is quite that simple. The 'real world' is not nearly as nicely ordered and specified as a turns based game is. So a computer will be ideally positioned to take advantage of its ability to: - remember perfectly, forever - execute algorithms at extreme speed - in parallel So you end up with a race that is comparable to a sparrow against a jet airplane. Technology can and does beat biology regularly in all sorts of domains. Slowly but surely computers are making their way into the real world: their programmers - and by extension the systems - learn how to adapt to the messiness of interacting with life as we know it. Just like you'd first get kids to play in a playground (the games) and then let them loose in the real world (self driving cars and other much harder tasks). In the end, all of these amount to a slow but steady march towards human equivalence on a large range of tasks, and excelling humans on plenty of them. The hard AI question is one where we ask ourselves whether or not there will one of these days be a system that is better than humans on essentially all tasks without exception, including learning, creativity and so on. Once you reach that level all bets are off, until then the slow-but-steady march continues. The difference is evolution vs revolution, but we've already seen enough progress in limited AI domains that we could conclude we're already seeing a minimal revolution. Whether it will result in a major one is still an open question, it could easily be that progress will at some point plateau.
iopq 10y ago
It uses intuition to play, which is how humans play, but it does it by considering way more positions that humans.
- hueving 10y ago
  >It uses intuition to play, Not by the normal definition of intuition. It reasons about millions of moves.
  - kirrent 10y ago
    Could you provide a citation for that figure? It's not one I've read but I don't necessarily disbelieve it. It is worth considering this perspective from one of the Deepmind Nature papers: "During the match against Fan Hui, AlphaGo evaluated thousands of times fewer positions than Deep Blue did in its chess match against Kasparov; compensating by selecting those positions more intelligently, using the policy network, and evaluating them more precisely, using the value network—an approach that is perhaps closer to how humans play. Furthermore, while Deep Blue relied on a handcrafted evaluation function, the neural networks of AlphaGo are trained directly from gameplay purely through general-purpose supervised and reinforcement learning methods"
  - mistercow 10y ago
    Those are two independent sentences which are not mutually exclusive.
  - joesb 10y ago
    Your intuition is probably based on millions of events happened to you and your ancestor (parts that are developed through evolution and social construct).
    - manquer 10y ago
      Equivalent on the side would be million of games in the past either simulation or real human ones, both of which such systems use
  - 10y ago

matt4077 10y ago

Yes – stuff like this is confusing 'intelligence' with 'sentience'. Playing go or chess would have been classified as activities clearly requiring intelligence in the recent past. We're just moving the goalpost whenever AI advances. At some point, it'll probably divide mankind into fractions which either want or don't want to grant certain rights to AI (possibly obsoleted by the great AI uprising of 2025-20-11 6:45:23am to 2025-20-11 6:45:25am)

jacquesm 10y ago
I don't think it is quite that simple. The 'real world' is not nearly as nicely ordered and specified as a turns based game is. So a computer will be ideally positioned to take advantage of its ability to: - remember perfectly, forever - execute algorithms at extreme speed - in parallel So you end up with a race that is comparable to a sparrow against a jet airplane. Technology can and does beat biology regularly in all sorts of domains. Slowly but surely computers are making their way into the real world: their programmers - and by extension the systems - learn how to adapt to the messiness of interacting with life as we know it. Just like you'd first get kids to play in a playground (the games) and then let them loose in the real world (self driving cars and other much harder tasks). In the end, all of these amount to a slow but steady march towards human equivalence on a large range of tasks, and excelling humans on plenty of them. The hard AI question is one where we ask ourselves whether or not there will one of these days be a system that is better than humans on essentially all tasks without exception, including learning, creativity and so on. Once you reach that level all bets are off, until then the slow-but-steady march continues. The difference is evolution vs revolution, but we've already seen enough progress in limited AI domains that we could conclude we're already seeing a minimal revolution. Whether it will result in a major one is still an open question, it could easily be that progress will at some point plateau.

iopq 10y ago

It uses intuition to play, which is how humans play, but it does it by considering way more positions that humans.

hueving 10y ago
>It uses intuition to play, Not by the normal definition of intuition. It reasons about millions of moves.
- kirrent 10y ago
  Could you provide a citation for that figure? It's not one I've read but I don't necessarily disbelieve it. It is worth considering this perspective from one of the Deepmind Nature papers: "During the match against Fan Hui, AlphaGo evaluated thousands of times fewer positions than Deep Blue did in its chess match against Kasparov; compensating by selecting those positions more intelligently, using the policy network, and evaluating them more precisely, using the value network—an approach that is perhaps closer to how humans play. Furthermore, while Deep Blue relied on a handcrafted evaluation function, the neural networks of AlphaGo are trained directly from gameplay purely through general-purpose supervised and reinforcement learning methods"
- mistercow 10y ago
  Those are two independent sentences which are not mutually exclusive.
- joesb 10y ago
  Your intuition is probably based on millions of events happened to you and your ancestor (parts that are developed through evolution and social construct).
  - manquer 10y ago
    Equivalent on the side would be million of games in the past either simulation or real human ones, both of which such systems use
- 10y ago