20 ms·

The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo

359 points by tvvocold 9y ago

conanbatt 9y ago
This game's start is already fantastic. Ke Jie already played an adaptative tactic the bot, that is playing in a very solid and stylish game. It almost feels like a teaching game so far. As a former student of Lee Sedol and once aspiring professional Go player, i'd answer a few questions if you have any!
- rw 9y ago
  A) How would you characterize the differences and similarities between AlphaGo and the best human players? B) How has human play style changed since AlphaGo's introduction? C) What is the answer to the question you most want to be asked?
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    > How would you characterize the differences and similarities between AlphaGo and the best human players? The alphago that played Lee Sedol was still very machine-like. But the master series online felt like strong superiority. It started playing some novel moves that being at least reasonable, would make it harder to play against. In a way, it was like the radical new kid with new ideas that shakes up the foundations. So far in this game (move 40~0) i read calmness from white ,a calculated calmness. As if it knew that it would win. Note: in Go, you perceive a lot of feelings from your opponent, as the moves selected express a state of mind or emotion. AlphaGo is getting hard to distinguish from human beings. > How has human play style changed since AlphaGo's introduction? Hard to say, but alphago is definitely changing the fields of study. Professional go really is like brute-forcing the game. A professinoal chooses to go through an unstudied path because he thinks its superior, and then another professional tries to ravage that path. That adversity over professional games is what advances theory. In this game, black playing 3-3 (bottom right corner invasion) would have never been played before AlphaGo in the state of human theory. I was taught 15 years ago in my first beginner class how bad doing that is. > What is the answer to the question you most want to be asked? I guess that the most important question is what is the future of Go. Sure, current professionals will still live their lives by the game, but what is the point of being a professional in something a computer will just be better. As soon as AlphaGo beat lee sedol once last year, i said that the only future of Go right now is finding out if humans still posesss a skill AlphaGo doesnt. And thats why the pair go in this series is actually most interesting to me. Can a pro + alphaGo beat AlphaGo consistently? if so, it means humans still have something of an identity.
    - nullnilvoid 9y ago
      > what is the point of being a professional in something a computer will just be better. Chess was conquered by computers a long long time (in computer time) ago and the popularity of chess has only gone up, not down. There are many professionals making a living out of chess. The art of Go will live on for sure.
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        From a professional standpoint, thats pretty terrible. Sure, Catan is also easily solvable, but its played for fun. When you play as a professional you make a commitment to the board, to advance and explore the frontiers of the universe contained in the game. If the bot explores better than you every single time, you are just dedicating your life to trying to beat a calculator at arithmetics.
        nullnilvoid 9y ago
        At least right now, computers explore the frontiers of the universe only if we humans tell them to. They explore the way we program them to. If I want to explore the frontiers of Go, I would not care about winning or losing. I would enjoy the art, the beauty, and the philosophy of Go.
        saulrh 9y ago
        It's become a sport, with all that that implies. Training and supporting an olympic sprinter is a multi-million dollar investment. But olympic sprinters haven't been the fastest mode of travel in centuries. If all you want to do is go fast, you buy a really fast car or an aircraft and you go fast. But simply going fast isn't what the sport is about. It's about pushing humans to their limits and seeing what humans can do. It's a race. And chess has become the same. If you just want to win at chess, you ask a computer. But if you want to play a game of chess, or watch a game of chess, it's all about the humans.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        I agree with this point, but to me its a degradation of the game. It degrades into a sport. Go has something amazing about how we study pattenrs that are 100's of years old. Many current and active training materiels have up to 400 years old! Go is something were each generation looks at the previous one and builds on that, and its been a very old and iterative process. If go becomes an exercise by how little we lose to machines for, its a major degradation of the purpose of continuing that history. As a pro, you are just working towards the inevitable goal of solving the game, and then we are all free to never play that damn game ever again :)
- gallerdude 9y ago
  How far out are AlphaGo's ideas? Are they radically different, or rooted in human conventions?
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    There is a famous player called Takemiya Masaki. His style of game is called Cosmic Go, and his games were some of the most beautiful games in history. He had an amazing ability of making this natural flows and building massive central territory: something against conventional theory. His style died eventually because no-one could play like he did. Some professionals even mentioned that such a style could not be played unless Takemiya Masaki had amazing reading skills. Alpha Go has amazing reading skills. So he can actually easily afford to play such a style. Its like the revamping of a theory we all know its playable but as humans have a hard time having a winning rate with. On the other hand, alphago is definitely playing moves that are plain bad for conventional theory, but manages to get good positions regardless. Its possible that alphago is just more thorough, and human pattern matching naturally discard moves that most of the time are bad.
    - gallerdude 9y ago
      Thank you for your in-depth and engaging answers!
    - pcnix 9y ago
      Could you suggest a book that explores go history in a way a layman can follow? The way you explain it, it seems extremely interesting.
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        I dont know about history, but a book i can recommend is First Kyu. Very short and easy read about an aspiring professional play in Korea in the 50's. It containes many of the woes that haunt pro players.
    - snarf21 9y ago
      I only know a little about Go but you mentioned something here that I have discussed with a Go friend, reading skills. Is this the main reason AlphaGo is winning? It never gets tired and never misses a board position. It seems like computers finally have enough speed and memory to never miss a board position and humans (as a group) will never be able to match it, and only get further behind. Thoughts?
- alanfalcon 9y ago
  Thabk you for your offer! What is going through Lee Sedol's mind, watching this? Does he wish he was the guy getting the later crack at the more advanced version we see today, or has he come to terms with his single victory against AlphaGo a year ago? If these questions seem nonsensical it all, please feel free to reformulate them to something that has a more interesting answer.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    I cant speak much for lee sedol's mind :) I dont think he wants to play alphago again. Go is a game that relies a lot on confidence: professional players almost never play amateur players casually, for example. Thats because if they lose to an amateur player, it will affect their mindset, their confidence, and they could then perform worse in the real professional tournament. An argentinian amateur beat 2 strong professionals back then in 2001 in a major professional tournament: it was a huge sensation. Those two professionals basically disappeared from high ranking tournaments forever. It was said that the setback was so severe it affected them permanently(purely hearsay). Its not good for a professional to play a game he thinks he will lose.
    - Eerie 9y ago
      >I dont think he wants to play alphago again. Go is a game that relies a lot on confidence: professional players almost never play amateur players casually, for example. Thats because if they lose to an amateur player, it will affect their mindset, their confidence, and they could then perform worse in the real professional tournament. Sheesh, are their ego's really so brittle?
      - euyyn 9y ago
        Confidence and ego are different things. Self-doubt can affect your play, as in any sport. Doesn't mean that you're butthurt.
      - conanbatt 9y ago
        Theres a famous anecdote by Kitani Minoru, a famous Go player from the early 1900's that made a go school where every major 70's japanese player came from. He would scout talent in the country and once found a couple of brothers that played go. He played a game with the eldest, and he beat the eldest. He accepted his defeat quickly and offered Kitani to play again, that he wanted revenge. Kitani politely refused and played his younger brother. Kitan wins again, but the youngest bursts into crying. He was deeply upset at the loss and could not play another game even if he wanted to. Who do you think Kitani recommended to follow the path of a professional Go Player?
- DomreiRoam 9y ago
  Do you think that they will propose match with handicap? Do you know if it will change the value of the komi?
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    > Do you think that they will propose match with handicap? They should, but i mentioned they probably wont because it could affect them psychologically. Nobody wants to be the first one to go down in history as a loser with handicap. They would do it online, if it was an anonymous account, maybe. But it would still do them harm. > Do you know if it will change the value of the komi? Doubt it.
    - DomreiRoam 9y ago
      Thank you
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  People often talk about centaurs, half human, half machine being powerful than machine. Is this just a myth when it comes to AlphaGo?
  - munin 9y ago
    It's not even true in chess, centaurs stopped winning against machines unless the human half does nothing and just lets the machine play. There are centaur matches on the schedule this week for AlphaGo, so that should be interesting. edit: sources on the chess stuff follow. http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=30436 http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=3... http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=266 http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti... http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=272 http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti...
- cjbprime 9y ago
  Exciting! Have you written about your experience trying to become a pro anywhere?
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    No, but tehre are many people that did, and some succeeded, you can google around for stories :)
- hajile 9y ago
  If a slightly larger board were used, could human or computer adapt better given what they currently know? What about if the shape of the board were altered? Does alphago understand the underlying principles well enough to adapt them to unknown situation? I think that is the most interesting question left.
  - platz 9y ago
    redmond asked about different board sizes to someone on the alphgo tech team and I think they said it wasn't setup to play different size boards.
mlindner 9y ago
Match is live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM
otoburb 9y ago
For those that find the Google livestream jittery, I found the direct YouTube link[1] much smoother. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM
- KVFinn 9y ago
  A nice unofficial commentary here as well: https://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb https://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNgHXjIJo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNgHXjIJo4
f2f 9y ago
i love the commentary. for somebody who knows the rules but is not a frequent player it's just the right amount of detail i need. same guy who did the alphago commentary too, i believe.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Michael Redmond is a long time commentator. He is a 9p professional player that moved to Japan at a very early age. He is a very respected member of the community.
- rst 9y ago
  Michael Redmond, the only western-born pro to ever attain a 9-dan professional rank. (He sometimes does commentary for all-human pro tournaments for Japanese TV, in Japanese.) He's talking with Stephanie (Ming Ming) Yin, a 1-dan Chinese pro who currently teaches in New York.
  - f2f 9y ago
    don't know who to respond to, but i really enjoy the way he thinks. he tends to take over the commentary a little bit, and i'd love to hear her opinion, but the commentary is very respectable. kudos to them,happy to hear he's well respected.
    - wapz 9y ago
      He was voted best Go commentator on NHK(I believe) a few years ago (and Japan has a decent amount of professional go games on tv).
  - jackmott 9y ago
    Is Stephanie the woman who predicted the famous AlphaGo move against Lee Sedol when playing along on youtube?
    - namarie 9y ago
      That's Hajin Lee I think, who was also commenting.
mlindner 9y ago
I wish they would not keep panning the camera away from the explanation though. Google hired some pretty piss poor horrible camera operators. It really really sucks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- EGreg 9y ago
  They should have an AI do the camera work. And by they I of course mean an autonomous corporation that arranges the match, pays everyone and makes sure the humans show up on time by having backups for everyone around them.
atrudeau 9y ago
For those joining the stream now, can anyone indicate the current state of the match? Is AlphaGo already dominating? I keep waiting for the commentators to give their opinion but they haven't so far.
- partycoder 9y ago
  It's hard to say since Alpha Go's style is not about maximizing a score difference but about maximizing a probability of winning.
  - stouset 9y ago
    This is a really, really important point to consider. AlphaGo does not care if it wins by a half point or twenty points. Increasing your margin of victory past your margin of error is one way of achieving victory, but simply reducing your margin of error below your current margin of victory can be just as effective an approach in many situations. If AlphaGo is highly confident in its ability to reach an effective draw in other areas of the board, it will happily enter a line in the current area of play that only nets it a stone or two, rather than going for more material at the cost of uncertainty in the remaining areas in play.
    - davedx 9y ago
      How do you know that? A NN often maximizes its performance against a goal
      - partycoder 9y ago
        During the first game against Lee Sedol commenters labeled many Alpha Go moves as "mistakes", as well as "slow". It wasn't until the end when they started seeing the results of those moves.
      - bingojess 9y ago
        It's been mentioned. Also when building the best Go bot would they try to maximise it's win rate instead of getting larger winning margins but winning less often?
nialv7 9y ago
Seeing how little time AlphaGo used compared to Ke Jie, I wonder how much computation power AlphaGo is allowed to use this time?
- gamegoblin 9y ago
  I suspect it's also likely that AlphaGo continues thinking during the human's turn, and is more able than a human to effectively use its opponent's time to frontload certain computations.
  - Radim 9y ago
    Both contestants use their opponent's time to think, naturally. I'm not sure what "frontload certain computations" means, but this arrangement sounds only fair. It's not like Ke Jie's brain switches off once he puts down a stone.
    - jhall1468 9y ago
      AlphaGo calculates the most likely human moves when they play their turn, and focuses it's next play on the most likely outcomes. So as long as a human plays like a human, it's done a mountain of calculations on what it should do next based on what the human player is likely to do. That's kind of what happened with the huge move by Lee Sedol last year. AlphaGo calculated a 1/10000 chance for a human to make the move he did, so (A) it did little to prepare for it (B) it played its move prior to that BASED on the idea that Lee Sedol simply wasn't going to do what he did.
      - Radim 9y ago
        There's no difference between humans and AI in that regard. Everybody tries to read and analyze the most likely sequences (duh). Or I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
        jhall1468 9y ago
        There is an ENORMOUS difference. A computer can read hundreds, if not millions of moves ahead. A human is incapable of reading more than maybe 1 or 2 moves ahead in Go and even that assumes AlphaGo is going to do what humans do, which it has proven it does not. I mean sure, if you broaden the term to the point that they both "do stuff", then yes, they do the same thing. But saying they try to "read an analyze" sequences is pointless. Of course both do that. But how they do it differs vastly, because AlphaGo can do things no human can. It's not just the depth in which it can do it.
partycoder 9y ago
Some key differences between this match and the Lee Sedol one are: 1) Ke Jie has an estimation of Alpha Go's skill. Lee Sedol did not know how strong Alpha Go was. Lee Sedol was very skeptical that a bot could have reached such high level. 2) Ke Jie has been able to study a game where Alpha Go was beaten. 3) Ke Jie has been able to play Alpha Go before, with faster game settings.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  4) Ke Jie has been able to study 60 AlphaGo games (albeit with faster time settings) 5) No one expects Ke Jie to win. 6) AlphaGo has had more time to train. Between the Lee Sedol games and the 60 game series, there seems to have been noticeable changes.
  - partycoder 9y ago
    Still makes a difference to have an idea of how strong your opponent is. A strong component behind Lee Sedol's performance was that uncertainty, as mentioned in his interviews.
    - 2bitencryption 9y ago
      you could be certain or uncertain that your opponent is three stones stronger than you -- either way, your opponent is still three stones stronger than you :)
      - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
        If you know your opponent is significantly stronger that you, you can aim to make things more complicated and hope to bait out a mistake.
        partycoder 9y ago
        I think that's not a wise thing to do against a stronger player. Stronger players actually start complicated fights to prevail through superior reading. It is possible however to win like this against a stronger player, if you make effective use of time management... e.g: leave lots of aji, then force fights with complicated variations when the opponent has limited time (e.g: towards the end game) to force mistakes or winning by time. These tricks are informally known as "timesujis".
FrozenVoid 9y ago
Why Ke Jie doesn't connect stones in left-center groups?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gizmo686 9y ago
  Which connection are you looking at? The only questionable connection I see in that group is the stick at the top (the four stones on the 7'th column); but the cut doesn't quite work out for white because after the cut, black can extend his two dead stones at the 3-2 point. By cutting, white shorted himself a liberty.
devrandomguy 9y ago
A photo of White: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-DoMQ0CuAQ/VzzPgbjhjOI/AAAAAAAACp4/5v6prECMLigEfJ23VigpjPWXoH-lT05UgCLcB/s1600/tpu-1.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-DoMQ0CuAQ/VzzPgbjhjOI/AAAAAAAAC... It is a rack of tensor processing units. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha...
sagivo 9y ago
i would love to see a match between alpha go vs a group of humans. I think it's a better match since as computer can use multi cores so humans can use multi-minds.
- gizmo686 9y ago
  Thursday :)
  - sagivo 9y ago
    that would be worth watching for sure. the only drawback is that humans are not usually "trained" to work together at this game like a computer who can multi-task.
    - amelius 9y ago
      Yes. I'm not sure if game-playing by "democratic" means is going to be such a success.
chj 9y ago
alpha go wins by 1/4
- alanfalcon 9y ago
  Which, it bears repeating, is no different to AlphaGo than if it had won by 14 points—it is programmed only to win, not to give any preference to larger margins of win. And being so expert at reading the board, it will often sacrifice that margin of victory for even the smallest increase in overall win percentage, leading to many "close" games like this. That said, I totally appreciate Ke Jie actually taking one of these live matches to the bitter end so we could see the counting process play out.
  - paradite 9y ago
    I understand that margin of wining and chance of winning are two different goals for optimization, but I would expect them to positively correlated, i.e. if you are winning more, then you have higher chance of winning.
    - weavie 9y ago
      Not necessarily. If you are ahead in points you have a higher chance of winning by playing defensive moves and strengthening your position. When behind you need to play riskier moves which could win you a lot of points, but could also risk spreading yourself too thinly resulting in your complete decimation.
      - Someone 9y ago
        So, that means Ke Jie either didn't know he was losing, or didn't play to win at the end, or played brilliantly at the end, picking the optimal move every time?
        weavie 9y ago
        From what I have heard Alpha Go was roughly 10 points ahead by the end game, but didn't then bother maintaining the lead. In other words, it was aiming for a 0.5 point lead. Ke Jie would have known he was losing, it is a credit to him that he pushed through to the end so we could all marvel at the spectacle.
gallerdude 9y ago
Games are the first step. There will be a point in time where the only things humans are best at is being human.
- kleer001 9y ago
  best at making more humans... at least for a little while longer.
  - visarga 9y ago
    Artificial (3d printed) ovaries are a thing. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed-ovaries-allow-infertile-mice-to-give-birth https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed-o...
- chillydawg 9y ago
  Until google can simulate us for click through montecarlo simulations to make their ads better.
- stupidcar 9y ago
  Eventually, we might not be the best at that either. Imagine AI companions that can not only perfectly emulate human behaviour, but can produce simulations of empathy, compassion, humour, etc. perfectly tailored to an individual's psyche. When we imagine intelligent AIs keeping humans as pets, we tend to do so in analogous terms to how we treat animals: E.g. in sparse, constrained environments, like cages and zoos. But those environments are designed with animal level intelligence and instincts in mind. AIs will probably design habitats intended to placate human instincts. And a big part of that will be keeping us psychologically happy, which will involve providing simulated companionship.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Well, isn't that what humans do, in relationships? So AIs will just do it faster, and in parallel, modeling far more possible forks.
  - 9y ago
IIAOPSW 9y ago
If AlphaGo wins the series then Google should be unblocked in China. Is the People's Government willing to take Google up on my proposed wager?
- silverkity 9y ago
  They already blocked the live for this match.
  - Macuyiko 9y ago
    Did they? I was wondering about they'd unblock YouTube for a while for the Chinese livestream. So apparently this was not the case. There has been talk from Google recently that they're planning to enter China again, at least for the Android space (Play store and services, for example).
pmontra 9y ago
Ke Jie lost 14-7 by FineArt recently (Tencent's Go bot) [1], but 13-0 in the last games (an update to the bot?) so it would really interesting to see the two bots playing each other. I watched this game [2] of FineArt against Japan's Ichiri Ryo yesterday (1-0) and it seems that FineArt has a different way of playing than AlphaGo, more fighting, but that's only one game. [1] https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14125 https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14125 [2] http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1819 http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1819
- albertzeyer 9y ago
  It's the first time I read about the FineArt Go bot (by Tencent?). Is there any more information about it? How does it compare to AlphaGo? What software/algorithms does it use?
  - pmontra 9y ago
    Some links about FineArt. In English http://technode.com/2017/03/20/tencents-fine-art-wins-computer-go-uec-cup/ http://technode.com/2017/03/20/tencents-fine-art-wins-comput... https://qz.com/936654/googles-alpha-go-now-has-a-serious-game-playing-rival-with-tencents-jueyi-or-fineart/ https://qz.com/936654/googles-alpha-go-now-has-a-serious-gam... In Chinese http://tech.qq.com/a/20170319/015726.htm http://tech.qq.com/a/20170319/015726.htm https://www.huxiu.com/article/186238.html https://www.huxiu.com/article/186238.html From the second English link: > As Tencent’s tech blog explains (link in Chinese), FineArts works in a similar way to AlphaGo. Both AIs comprise two computer systems modeled on the human brain, which can be trained on large data sets. One part of the system, the “policy network,” predicts which of the possible moves are the likeliest to be played. The other, the “value network,” then evaluates which of those is likeliest to win
    - albertzeyer 9y ago
      Ah, so Tencent is a company. "Chinese tech giant Tencent". They did QQ and WeChat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent It seems as if they are even bigger than Baidu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu) which is maybe more known (at least by me). It seems this is the website of the group (the Tencent AI lab) which developed the FineArt Go bot: http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/ http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/ Here some article from Tencent about their Go bot (in Chinese): http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/%E5%86%8D%E5%88%9B%E4%BD%B3%E7%BB%A9%E8%85%BE%E8%AE%AF%E5%9B%B4%E6%A3%8BAI%E2%80%9C%E7%BB%9D%E8%89%BA%E2%80%9D%E7%94%B5%E5%9C%A3%E6%88%98%E5%A4%BA%E5%86%A0.html http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/%E5%86%8D%E5%88%9B%E4%BD%B3%E7%B... There is also a Wikipedia article about the Fine Art Go bot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_(software) Along the line, I also read about DeepZenGo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(software)
sadgit 9y ago
Next challenge: a machine that can can beat a human using an equal amount of energy.
- _yosefk 9y ago
  No problem beating most humans already. Beating the best human? How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Such humans are rare so you ought to count all the others as part of the cost of making the best human as you can't quite make them on demand (though Laslo Polgar might disagree). I don't get the energy point. The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. Doesn't that count for something? But your wish will come true. Go isn't a special snowflake. If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win.
  - al_chemist 9y ago
    > How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? By your definition, on AI side we should add energy spent on creating AI and civilization that produced it.
    - piyush_soni 9y ago
      And also, there's a certain amount of 'healthcare' cost involved like with all other computers.
    - jayd16 9y ago
      I think he's amortizing the cost to zero for the AI because the marginal cost per additional AI is much lower than the cost to sustain a civilization to churn out and bin human go players.
  - dogecoinbase 9y ago
    How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Did... you really just say that, about a process that requires not only a civilization, but one sufficiently decadent that it can afford to waste resources making silicon that turns burned coal into pointless game victories? The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. I think by your previous metrics, you should be counting the heathcare costs of the ops folks who run the hardware, and I guess the healthcare costs of their healthcare workers, ad nauseum.
loup-vaillant 9y ago
Some commenters on Twitter are still saying 0.5 points is "very close". It would be if both players were human: in human play, score differences tend to correlate with differences in actual skill, and probability of outcome (who wins the game). Not so with Alpha go. That machine just takes the surest path to victory, with no regards to its magnitude. It doesn't care about winning by only half a point. It cares about securing at least half a point. It may have been a crushing victory for all we know.
- glandium 9y ago
  It would be interesting to see how Alpha Go's performance varies with different goals, balancing between maximizing score and maximizing probability of winning.
  - harshreality 9y ago
    I have to think they've discussed that internally, and they probably just want to make sure alphago can win consistently, period, before they start playing around with allowing slightly riskier moves as long as the win probability stays sufficiently above 50%. (But how much more? You can't know ahead of time how much stronger you are than the other player that day, or you wouldn't be playing, at least not for money.) It's just like adjusting komi to give the human an advantage, right?
    - glandium 9y ago
      An indirect way to do something similar-ish to what I was interested in would be to play with varying numbers of handicap stones with the current goal unchanged (maximizing probability of victory).
      - sanxiyn 9y ago
        Actually, this mostly works. http://pasky.or.cz/go/dynkomi.pdf http://pasky.or.cz/go/dynkomi.pdf has details how to do so.
- 9y ago
Macuyiko 9y ago
I hope the next focus for Deepmind will be on opening up the black box and trying to put some explainability aspects in place, as has been done before for other deep learning architectures (or at least, people are starting to play around with). So many questions of the form "I wish we could ask AlphaGo what is was thinking here" -- so this would be great to have.
- orthoganol 9y ago
  Probably something like "I've been trained on many similar past situations, these are possible moves that worked out well, let's simulate a few of them internally, OK, here's my move." Full disclosure, I really don't know much about the internals of DeepMind, but if it's just a DL system on steroids with sampling, there isn't really any 'thinking' happening, it's just tapping probability distros over possible moves conditioned on tons of training data.
  - Macuyiko 9y ago
    I didn't downvote you, but there's more going on here than just inferencing over a database of prior knowledge. The game is too complex for that. Compare this approach for instance to Monte Carlo based approaches which aren't doing so well. Speaking of Monte Carlo, the Lee Sedol version of AlphaGo did combine a series of deep networks with Monte Carlo sampling, but rumor is that was replaced in this version altogether (it's also running on TPU's now). Would like to see some more technical details as well.
    - computerex 9y ago
      Their state of the art approach hybridizes MCTS with deep neural networks. I'd be interesting indeed if they manage to get better performance without MCTS all together, although they did achieve very impressive performance without MCTS.
  - taneq 9y ago
    How do you define 'thinking' such that an artificial neural network can't do it, but a biological neural network can?
jsweojtj 9y ago
Does anyone know whether they isolate generations of AlphaGo and then recombine them after a while? Simulating something like, having Go being played in geographically distinct countries for years and then having the (perhaps many) traditions clash?
- antome 9y ago
  This is one of the common extentions to Genetic Algorithms. It does not sound as though they are not going to such extremes here, but it is a reasonable concept.
lz400 9y ago
In the other thread some people mentioned that Je Kie has already lost twice, 14-7 and 13-0, to another Go bot called FineArt (by Tencent)? odd that didn't get any exposure while everyone is watching this game so attentively. Assuming this information accurate, FineArt has already proven bots are above humans, that's moot. At this point if AlphaGo loses it only makes FineArt more impressive! The real match would be Tencent vs Deepmind.
- wapz 9y ago
  I believe FineArt was developed after Alpha Go..
  - lz400 9y ago
    Still, seems playing humans is no longer very exciting. To me at least the interesting part is whether a company like Tencent can start after AlphaGo and still produce a better product than the arguably most recognized AI group in the world.
  - gcp 9y ago
    I believe Google was developed after AltaVista..
- fahadkhan 9y ago
  "The real match would be Tencent vs Deepmind." I really like this, as it puts into to context that there is nothing artificial about the intelligence, it is the achievement teams of people.
  - psyc 9y ago
    Like there's nothing artificial about this chair I made. It's just an expression of my capacity for sitting.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- 9y ago
quakenul 9y ago
Can anyone shed light on the significance? AlphaGo already beat a top human quite decisively a few month ago. How is this different?
- RubenSandwich 9y ago
  This is different because while AlphaGo did beat Lee Sedol a while ago. Lee was ranked 2nd in the world for Go. Ke Jie, AlphaGo's current opponent, is ranked 1st in the world.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    He's also had more time and data to try develop anti-AI tactics and prepare against AlphaGo's strategy. While Sedol mostly went in blind.
    - alanfalcon 9y ago
      At the time there wasn't much expectation in the Go community that an AI could really compete at the top level, either. Everything is different now.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  Lee Sedol was not the top human, he was #4 when that happened, and now he's #7. Ke Jie was, and still is #1. https://www.goratings.org/en/ https://www.goratings.org/en/
rurban 9y ago
0.5 is not really decisive enough. Let's wait for the next games. Je Kie is really good, much better than in the training games online.
- nightcracker 9y ago
  AlphaGo does not distinguish between 0.5 points and 30 points. Its only objective is to win, and to absolutely secure the win. It doesn't care by how much it wins.
  - rurban 9y ago
    No point in repeating the well-known. 0.5 is almost nothing, go is not just binary win or loose.
    - gcp 9y ago
      The match standings are 1-0 for AlphaGo, not +0.5 for AlphaGo.
    - inimino 9y ago
      It is exactly binary win or lose. In fact, 0.5 is exactly what you would expect a superhuman master to win by, every time, against a very strong opponent. (It's "lose" not "loose".)
    - namarie 9y ago
      It had a 10-15 point advantage in the middle game. It chose to whittle it away in the endgame in exchange for more safety. In my opinion that makes it even more impressive.
      - rurban 9y ago
        I'm aware of that. I'm also aware of the troubles in counting and evaluation of it's strange/bad moves. It's not impressive at all to go away with only 0.5 after such a large lead. Think about your confirmation bias a bit. Ke Jie knows that he will probably loose, but this will give him confidence. And confidence is what they need at most, much more than in chess. Otherwise Ke Jie will probably have to end his lucrative career. It not over yet.
dingo_bat 9y ago
LOL, apparently Chinese media has been ordered to censor all coverage of the loss.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dashedbanana 9y ago
  Can you read Chinese? Every news site in China reported his loss. Try harder. I'll give you one of the biggest media sites. http://www.163.com/ http://www.163.com/ It's on headline. "人机大战首局柯洁苦战落败 AlphaGo胜1/4子暂1-0"
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    Oops, looks like I shouldn't rely on reddit for my news.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - mazerackham 9y ago
      don't believe anything you hear about China, especially if it falls into the "Chinese Government is an evil overlord" bucket, or you'll end up looking like an idiot.
      - arthur2e5 9y ago
        They were ordered to censor the video livestream (only allowing text) just ~1d before the event though.[0] Rumor has that the censorship order explicitly called for avoiding mentioning Google in the text streams. A YouTube mirror video livestream on Bilibili has been taken down for unknown reasons. [0] http://archive.is/tTgsx http://archive.is/tTgsx (original page already gone) It might not be the gov't intending to act evil in this case -- it can be some random "old red army" hearing about Google's involvement in this thing and protesting. But no matter what the underlying reason is, they are defly trying to hide something they are not supposed to in order to make stuff look good. (They ain't no White Lotus.[1]) You don't need an evil overlord to do this; a narcissist will suffice. [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/白莲花/17505528 https://baike.baidu.com/item/白莲花/17505528
alexdowad 9y ago
A Go amateur's synopsis: it seemed like Ke was winning and it seemed like Ke was winning and then stuff got complicated and then AlphaGo won.
- nopinsight 9y ago
  This is a strategy a superintelligence could/would use if they want to take over. They know that humans do not trust them, so they make sure almost all humans with power feel in control for as long as possible. Then the situations may get complicated for a while with confusion and disagreements between humans during the transition. Then flip the switches. Note: I understand that the reason for the appearance that AlphaGo does not have a large margin earlier in the game is quite different. I simply see a plausible parallel with your observation regarding the game of Go and the scenario of superintelligence take over, if we develop them wrong.
  - bmh100 9y ago
    The idea of a super-human strong AI is really just anthropomorphizing computer programs. The only realistic way this could occur is by emulating or uploading a human mind.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    I think this interpretation just stems from our insecurity as human beings when it comes to our own brain capacity. What I think is really going on (and what will actually happen if a "robot takeover" happens) is the computer just does its thing, but because it's so powerful, it's out of reach of any human being's understanding, and people think they are pulling some trick. Machines can win without using tricks just based on their computing power. Yesterday I heard one of the commentators say something like "what i liked about alphago today was how effortless it's playing. It's almost like it's just playing happily and not even trying hard, giving away losses happily when it comes to it." Alphago has no emotion, but just like how human beings look at something that walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and conclude it's a duck, humans interpret everything based on their point of view, thinking "I can actually feel what alphago is feeling, just based on its moves". Another thing they said was something like "there's a high level player premium", meaning when people play against other people, they can't ignore all the subtle little queues, such as how much time they're taking to come up with a move, whereas Ke Jie has no such thing against alphago because alphago doesn't care. (Whereas Ke Jie does care) I think if anything, that kind of emotional vulnerability is what will bring human down against machines.
tiktoktik 9y ago
This is good!
balliballi 9y ago
The new world order
mda 9y ago
I have a feeling that Lee Sedol's single win will be remembered as the first and the last instance of a human victory versus a strong AI in game of go.
- gort 9y ago
  There are other strong AIs out there now, Zen and Fine Art. Both are active on internet Go servers. They're still losing sometimes. But if you mean the last victory against the very strongest, you're probably right.
  - mda 9y ago
    Yes, by strong, i meant alphago level.
  - alanfalcon 9y ago
    Yes, I got that inpression in the moment watching game 4 last year: "We will never see this again." It remains to be proven empirically but that's why we're here.
RolandHo290339 9y ago
From the start Ke Jie had chosen the path of narrow but certain defeat, without himself knowing. Alphago knew it all the time and therefore let Ke Jie to take the course of euthanasia. The end result is a close defeat but it was a total defeat all the way.

359 points by tvvocold 9y ago

This game's start is already fantastic. Ke Jie already played an adaptative tactic the bot, that is playing in a very solid and stylish game. It almost feels like a teaching game so far. As a former student of Lee Sedol and once aspiring professional Go player, i'd answer a few questions if you have any!

rw 9y ago
A) How would you characterize the differences and similarities between AlphaGo and the best human players? B) How has human play style changed since AlphaGo's introduction? C) What is the answer to the question you most want to be asked?
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > How would you characterize the differences and similarities between AlphaGo and the best human players? The alphago that played Lee Sedol was still very machine-like. But the master series online felt like strong superiority. It started playing some novel moves that being at least reasonable, would make it harder to play against. In a way, it was like the radical new kid with new ideas that shakes up the foundations. So far in this game (move 40~0) i read calmness from white ,a calculated calmness. As if it knew that it would win. Note: in Go, you perceive a lot of feelings from your opponent, as the moves selected express a state of mind or emotion. AlphaGo is getting hard to distinguish from human beings. > How has human play style changed since AlphaGo's introduction? Hard to say, but alphago is definitely changing the fields of study. Professional go really is like brute-forcing the game. A professinoal chooses to go through an unstudied path because he thinks its superior, and then another professional tries to ravage that path. That adversity over professional games is what advances theory. In this game, black playing 3-3 (bottom right corner invasion) would have never been played before AlphaGo in the state of human theory. I was taught 15 years ago in my first beginner class how bad doing that is. > What is the answer to the question you most want to be asked? I guess that the most important question is what is the future of Go. Sure, current professionals will still live their lives by the game, but what is the point of being a professional in something a computer will just be better. As soon as AlphaGo beat lee sedol once last year, i said that the only future of Go right now is finding out if humans still posesss a skill AlphaGo doesnt. And thats why the pair go in this series is actually most interesting to me. Can a pro + alphaGo beat AlphaGo consistently? if so, it means humans still have something of an identity.
  - nullnilvoid 9y ago
    > what is the point of being a professional in something a computer will just be better. Chess was conquered by computers a long long time (in computer time) ago and the popularity of chess has only gone up, not down. There are many professionals making a living out of chess. The art of Go will live on for sure.
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      From a professional standpoint, thats pretty terrible. Sure, Catan is also easily solvable, but its played for fun. When you play as a professional you make a commitment to the board, to advance and explore the frontiers of the universe contained in the game. If the bot explores better than you every single time, you are just dedicating your life to trying to beat a calculator at arithmetics.
      - nullnilvoid 9y ago
        At least right now, computers explore the frontiers of the universe only if we humans tell them to. They explore the way we program them to. If I want to explore the frontiers of Go, I would not care about winning or losing. I would enjoy the art, the beauty, and the philosophy of Go.
      - saulrh 9y ago
        It's become a sport, with all that that implies. Training and supporting an olympic sprinter is a multi-million dollar investment. But olympic sprinters haven't been the fastest mode of travel in centuries. If all you want to do is go fast, you buy a really fast car or an aircraft and you go fast. But simply going fast isn't what the sport is about. It's about pushing humans to their limits and seeing what humans can do. It's a race. And chess has become the same. If you just want to win at chess, you ask a computer. But if you want to play a game of chess, or watch a game of chess, it's all about the humans.
        conanbatt 9y ago
        I agree with this point, but to me its a degradation of the game. It degrades into a sport. Go has something amazing about how we study pattenrs that are 100's of years old. Many current and active training materiels have up to 400 years old! Go is something were each generation looks at the previous one and builds on that, and its been a very old and iterative process. If go becomes an exercise by how little we lose to machines for, its a major degradation of the purpose of continuing that history. As a pro, you are just working towards the inevitable goal of solving the game, and then we are all free to never play that damn game ever again :)
gallerdude 9y ago
How far out are AlphaGo's ideas? Are they radically different, or rooted in human conventions?
- conanbatt 9y ago
  There is a famous player called Takemiya Masaki. His style of game is called Cosmic Go, and his games were some of the most beautiful games in history. He had an amazing ability of making this natural flows and building massive central territory: something against conventional theory. His style died eventually because no-one could play like he did. Some professionals even mentioned that such a style could not be played unless Takemiya Masaki had amazing reading skills. Alpha Go has amazing reading skills. So he can actually easily afford to play such a style. Its like the revamping of a theory we all know its playable but as humans have a hard time having a winning rate with. On the other hand, alphago is definitely playing moves that are plain bad for conventional theory, but manages to get good positions regardless. Its possible that alphago is just more thorough, and human pattern matching naturally discard moves that most of the time are bad.
  - gallerdude 9y ago
    Thank you for your in-depth and engaging answers!
  - pcnix 9y ago
    Could you suggest a book that explores go history in a way a layman can follow? The way you explain it, it seems extremely interesting.
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      I dont know about history, but a book i can recommend is First Kyu. Very short and easy read about an aspiring professional play in Korea in the 50's. It containes many of the woes that haunt pro players.
  - snarf21 9y ago
    I only know a little about Go but you mentioned something here that I have discussed with a Go friend, reading skills. Is this the main reason AlphaGo is winning? It never gets tired and never misses a board position. It seems like computers finally have enough speed and memory to never miss a board position and humans (as a group) will never be able to match it, and only get further behind. Thoughts?
alanfalcon 9y ago
Thabk you for your offer! What is going through Lee Sedol's mind, watching this? Does he wish he was the guy getting the later crack at the more advanced version we see today, or has he come to terms with his single victory against AlphaGo a year ago? If these questions seem nonsensical it all, please feel free to reformulate them to something that has a more interesting answer.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  I cant speak much for lee sedol's mind :) I dont think he wants to play alphago again. Go is a game that relies a lot on confidence: professional players almost never play amateur players casually, for example. Thats because if they lose to an amateur player, it will affect their mindset, their confidence, and they could then perform worse in the real professional tournament. An argentinian amateur beat 2 strong professionals back then in 2001 in a major professional tournament: it was a huge sensation. Those two professionals basically disappeared from high ranking tournaments forever. It was said that the setback was so severe it affected them permanently(purely hearsay). Its not good for a professional to play a game he thinks he will lose.
  - Eerie 9y ago
    >I dont think he wants to play alphago again. Go is a game that relies a lot on confidence: professional players almost never play amateur players casually, for example. Thats because if they lose to an amateur player, it will affect their mindset, their confidence, and they could then perform worse in the real professional tournament. Sheesh, are their ego's really so brittle?
    - euyyn 9y ago
      Confidence and ego are different things. Self-doubt can affect your play, as in any sport. Doesn't mean that you're butthurt.
    - conanbatt 9y ago
      Theres a famous anecdote by Kitani Minoru, a famous Go player from the early 1900's that made a go school where every major 70's japanese player came from. He would scout talent in the country and once found a couple of brothers that played go. He played a game with the eldest, and he beat the eldest. He accepted his defeat quickly and offered Kitani to play again, that he wanted revenge. Kitani politely refused and played his younger brother. Kitan wins again, but the youngest bursts into crying. He was deeply upset at the loss and could not play another game even if he wanted to. Who do you think Kitani recommended to follow the path of a professional Go Player?
DomreiRoam 9y ago
Do you think that they will propose match with handicap? Do you know if it will change the value of the komi?
- conanbatt 9y ago
  > Do you think that they will propose match with handicap? They should, but i mentioned they probably wont because it could affect them psychologically. Nobody wants to be the first one to go down in history as a loser with handicap. They would do it online, if it was an anonymous account, maybe. But it would still do them harm. > Do you know if it will change the value of the komi? Doubt it.
  - DomreiRoam 9y ago
    Thank you
perseusprime11 9y ago
People often talk about centaurs, half human, half machine being powerful than machine. Is this just a myth when it comes to AlphaGo?
- munin 9y ago
  It's not even true in chess, centaurs stopped winning against machines unless the human half does nothing and just lets the machine play. There are centaur matches on the schedule this week for AlphaGo, so that should be interesting. edit: sources on the chess stuff follow. http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=30436 http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=3... http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=266 http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti... http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=272 http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti...
cjbprime 9y ago
Exciting! Have you written about your experience trying to become a pro anywhere?
- conanbatt 9y ago
  No, but tehre are many people that did, and some succeeded, you can google around for stories :)
hajile 9y ago
If a slightly larger board were used, could human or computer adapt better given what they currently know? What about if the shape of the board were altered? Does alphago understand the underlying principles well enough to adapt them to unknown situation? I think that is the most interesting question left.
- platz 9y ago
  redmond asked about different board sizes to someone on the alphgo tech team and I think they said it wasn't setup to play different size boards.

mlindner 9y ago

Match is live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM

otoburb 9y ago

For those that find the Google livestream jittery, I found the direct YouTube link[1] much smoother. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM

KVFinn 9y ago
A nice unofficial commentary here as well: https://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb https://www.twitch.tv/usgoweb or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNgHXjIJo4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFNgHXjIJo4

f2f 9y ago

i love the commentary. for somebody who knows the rules but is not a frequent player it's just the right amount of detail i need. same guy who did the alphago commentary too, i believe.

conanbatt 9y ago
Michael Redmond is a long time commentator. He is a 9p professional player that moved to Japan at a very early age. He is a very respected member of the community.
rst 9y ago
Michael Redmond, the only western-born pro to ever attain a 9-dan professional rank. (He sometimes does commentary for all-human pro tournaments for Japanese TV, in Japanese.) He's talking with Stephanie (Ming Ming) Yin, a 1-dan Chinese pro who currently teaches in New York.
- f2f 9y ago
  don't know who to respond to, but i really enjoy the way he thinks. he tends to take over the commentary a little bit, and i'd love to hear her opinion, but the commentary is very respectable. kudos to them,happy to hear he's well respected.
  - wapz 9y ago
    He was voted best Go commentator on NHK(I believe) a few years ago (and Japan has a decent amount of professional go games on tv).
- jackmott 9y ago
  Is Stephanie the woman who predicted the famous AlphaGo move against Lee Sedol when playing along on youtube?
  - namarie 9y ago
    That's Hajin Lee I think, who was also commenting.

mlindner 9y ago

I wish they would not keep panning the camera away from the explanation though. Google hired some pretty piss poor horrible camera operators. It really really sucks.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
EGreg 9y ago
They should have an AI do the camera work. And by they I of course mean an autonomous corporation that arranges the match, pays everyone and makes sure the humans show up on time by having backups for everyone around them.

atrudeau 9y ago

For those joining the stream now, can anyone indicate the current state of the match? Is AlphaGo already dominating? I keep waiting for the commentators to give their opinion but they haven't so far.

partycoder 9y ago
It's hard to say since Alpha Go's style is not about maximizing a score difference but about maximizing a probability of winning.
- stouset 9y ago
  This is a really, really important point to consider. AlphaGo does not care if it wins by a half point or twenty points. Increasing your margin of victory past your margin of error is one way of achieving victory, but simply reducing your margin of error below your current margin of victory can be just as effective an approach in many situations. If AlphaGo is highly confident in its ability to reach an effective draw in other areas of the board, it will happily enter a line in the current area of play that only nets it a stone or two, rather than going for more material at the cost of uncertainty in the remaining areas in play.
  - davedx 9y ago
    How do you know that? A NN often maximizes its performance against a goal
    - partycoder 9y ago
      During the first game against Lee Sedol commenters labeled many Alpha Go moves as "mistakes", as well as "slow". It wasn't until the end when they started seeing the results of those moves.
    - bingojess 9y ago
      It's been mentioned. Also when building the best Go bot would they try to maximise it's win rate instead of getting larger winning margins but winning less often?

nialv7 9y ago

Seeing how little time AlphaGo used compared to Ke Jie, I wonder how much computation power AlphaGo is allowed to use this time?

gamegoblin 9y ago
I suspect it's also likely that AlphaGo continues thinking during the human's turn, and is more able than a human to effectively use its opponent's time to frontload certain computations.
- Radim 9y ago
  Both contestants use their opponent's time to think, naturally. I'm not sure what "frontload certain computations" means, but this arrangement sounds only fair. It's not like Ke Jie's brain switches off once he puts down a stone.
  - jhall1468 9y ago
    AlphaGo calculates the most likely human moves when they play their turn, and focuses it's next play on the most likely outcomes. So as long as a human plays like a human, it's done a mountain of calculations on what it should do next based on what the human player is likely to do. That's kind of what happened with the huge move by Lee Sedol last year. AlphaGo calculated a 1/10000 chance for a human to make the move he did, so (A) it did little to prepare for it (B) it played its move prior to that BASED on the idea that Lee Sedol simply wasn't going to do what he did.
    - Radim 9y ago
      There's no difference between humans and AI in that regard. Everybody tries to read and analyze the most likely sequences (duh). Or I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
      - jhall1468 9y ago
        There is an ENORMOUS difference. A computer can read hundreds, if not millions of moves ahead. A human is incapable of reading more than maybe 1 or 2 moves ahead in Go and even that assumes AlphaGo is going to do what humans do, which it has proven it does not. I mean sure, if you broaden the term to the point that they both "do stuff", then yes, they do the same thing. But saying they try to "read an analyze" sequences is pointless. Of course both do that. But how they do it differs vastly, because AlphaGo can do things no human can. It's not just the depth in which it can do it.

partycoder 9y ago

Some key differences between this match and the Lee Sedol one are: 1) Ke Jie has an estimation of Alpha Go's skill. Lee Sedol did not know how strong Alpha Go was. Lee Sedol was very skeptical that a bot could have reached such high level. 2) Ke Jie has been able to study a game where Alpha Go was beaten. 3) Ke Jie has been able to play Alpha Go before, with faster game settings.

gizmo686 9y ago
4) Ke Jie has been able to study 60 AlphaGo games (albeit with faster time settings) 5) No one expects Ke Jie to win. 6) AlphaGo has had more time to train. Between the Lee Sedol games and the 60 game series, there seems to have been noticeable changes.
- partycoder 9y ago
  Still makes a difference to have an idea of how strong your opponent is. A strong component behind Lee Sedol's performance was that uncertainty, as mentioned in his interviews.
  - 2bitencryption 9y ago
    you could be certain or uncertain that your opponent is three stones stronger than you -- either way, your opponent is still three stones stronger than you :)
    - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
      If you know your opponent is significantly stronger that you, you can aim to make things more complicated and hope to bait out a mistake.
      - partycoder 9y ago
        I think that's not a wise thing to do against a stronger player. Stronger players actually start complicated fights to prevail through superior reading. It is possible however to win like this against a stronger player, if you make effective use of time management... e.g: leave lots of aji, then force fights with complicated variations when the opponent has limited time (e.g: towards the end game) to force mistakes or winning by time. These tricks are informally known as "timesujis".

FrozenVoid 9y ago

Why Ke Jie doesn't connect stones in left-center groups?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gizmo686 9y ago
Which connection are you looking at? The only questionable connection I see in that group is the stick at the top (the four stones on the 7'th column); but the cut doesn't quite work out for white because after the cut, black can extend his two dead stones at the 3-2 point. By cutting, white shorted himself a liberty.

devrandomguy 9y ago

A photo of White: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-DoMQ0CuAQ/VzzPgbjhjOI/AAAAAAAACp4/5v6prECMLigEfJ23VigpjPWXoH-lT05UgCLcB/s1600/tpu-1.png https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_-DoMQ0CuAQ/VzzPgbjhjOI/AAAAAAAAC... It is a rack of tensor processing units. https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercharges-machine-learning-tasks-with-custom-chip.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/05/Google-supercha...

sagivo 9y ago

i would love to see a match between alpha go vs a group of humans. I think it's a better match since as computer can use multi cores so humans can use multi-minds.

gizmo686 9y ago
Thursday :)
- sagivo 9y ago
  that would be worth watching for sure. the only drawback is that humans are not usually "trained" to work together at this game like a computer who can multi-task.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Yes. I'm not sure if game-playing by "democratic" means is going to be such a success.

chj 9y ago

alpha go wins by 1/4

alanfalcon 9y ago
Which, it bears repeating, is no different to AlphaGo than if it had won by 14 points—it is programmed only to win, not to give any preference to larger margins of win. And being so expert at reading the board, it will often sacrifice that margin of victory for even the smallest increase in overall win percentage, leading to many "close" games like this. That said, I totally appreciate Ke Jie actually taking one of these live matches to the bitter end so we could see the counting process play out.
- paradite 9y ago
  I understand that margin of wining and chance of winning are two different goals for optimization, but I would expect them to positively correlated, i.e. if you are winning more, then you have higher chance of winning.
  - weavie 9y ago
    Not necessarily. If you are ahead in points you have a higher chance of winning by playing defensive moves and strengthening your position. When behind you need to play riskier moves which could win you a lot of points, but could also risk spreading yourself too thinly resulting in your complete decimation.
    - Someone 9y ago
      So, that means Ke Jie either didn't know he was losing, or didn't play to win at the end, or played brilliantly at the end, picking the optimal move every time?
      - weavie 9y ago
        From what I have heard Alpha Go was roughly 10 points ahead by the end game, but didn't then bother maintaining the lead. In other words, it was aiming for a 0.5 point lead. Ke Jie would have known he was losing, it is a credit to him that he pushed through to the end so we could all marvel at the spectacle.

gallerdude 9y ago

Games are the first step. There will be a point in time where the only things humans are best at is being human.

kleer001 9y ago
best at making more humans... at least for a little while longer.
- visarga 9y ago
  Artificial (3d printed) ovaries are a thing. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed-ovaries-allow-infertile-mice-to-give-birth https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/16/3d-printed-o...
chillydawg 9y ago
Until google can simulate us for click through montecarlo simulations to make their ads better.
stupidcar 9y ago
Eventually, we might not be the best at that either. Imagine AI companions that can not only perfectly emulate human behaviour, but can produce simulations of empathy, compassion, humour, etc. perfectly tailored to an individual's psyche. When we imagine intelligent AIs keeping humans as pets, we tend to do so in analogous terms to how we treat animals: E.g. in sparse, constrained environments, like cages and zoos. But those environments are designed with animal level intelligence and instincts in mind. AIs will probably design habitats intended to placate human instincts. And a big part of that will be keeping us psychologically happy, which will involve providing simulated companionship.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Well, isn't that what humans do, in relationships? So AIs will just do it faster, and in parallel, modeling far more possible forks.
- 9y ago

IIAOPSW 9y ago

If AlphaGo wins the series then Google should be unblocked in China. Is the People's Government willing to take Google up on my proposed wager?

silverkity 9y ago
They already blocked the live for this match.
- Macuyiko 9y ago
  Did they? I was wondering about they'd unblock YouTube for a while for the Chinese livestream. So apparently this was not the case. There has been talk from Google recently that they're planning to enter China again, at least for the Android space (Play store and services, for example).

pmontra 9y ago

Ke Jie lost 14-7 by FineArt recently (Tencent's Go bot) [1], but 13-0 in the last games (an update to the bot?) so it would really interesting to see the two bots playing each other. I watched this game [2] of FineArt against Japan's Ichiri Ryo yesterday (1-0) and it seems that FineArt has a different way of playing than AlphaGo, more fighting, but that's only one game. [1] https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14125 https://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14125 [2] http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1819 http://www.go4go.net/go/games/byplayer/1819

albertzeyer 9y ago
It's the first time I read about the FineArt Go bot (by Tencent?). Is there any more information about it? How does it compare to AlphaGo? What software/algorithms does it use?
- pmontra 9y ago
  Some links about FineArt. In English http://technode.com/2017/03/20/tencents-fine-art-wins-computer-go-uec-cup/ http://technode.com/2017/03/20/tencents-fine-art-wins-comput... https://qz.com/936654/googles-alpha-go-now-has-a-serious-game-playing-rival-with-tencents-jueyi-or-fineart/ https://qz.com/936654/googles-alpha-go-now-has-a-serious-gam... In Chinese http://tech.qq.com/a/20170319/015726.htm http://tech.qq.com/a/20170319/015726.htm https://www.huxiu.com/article/186238.html https://www.huxiu.com/article/186238.html From the second English link: > As Tencent’s tech blog explains (link in Chinese), FineArts works in a similar way to AlphaGo. Both AIs comprise two computer systems modeled on the human brain, which can be trained on large data sets. One part of the system, the “policy network,” predicts which of the possible moves are the likeliest to be played. The other, the “value network,” then evaluates which of those is likeliest to win
  - albertzeyer 9y ago
    Ah, so Tencent is a company. "Chinese tech giant Tencent". They did QQ and WeChat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent It seems as if they are even bigger than Baidu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu) which is maybe more known (at least by me). It seems this is the website of the group (the Tencent AI lab) which developed the FineArt Go bot: http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/ http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/ Here some article from Tencent about their Go bot (in Chinese): http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/%E5%86%8D%E5%88%9B%E4%BD%B3%E7%BB%A9%E8%85%BE%E8%AE%AF%E5%9B%B4%E6%A3%8BAI%E2%80%9C%E7%BB%9D%E8%89%BA%E2%80%9D%E7%94%B5%E5%9C%A3%E6%88%98%E5%A4%BA%E5%86%A0.html http://ai.tencent.com/ailab/%E5%86%8D%E5%88%9B%E4%BD%B3%E7%B... There is also a Wikipedia article about the Fine Art Go bot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_(software) Along the line, I also read about DeepZenGo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(software)

sadgit 9y ago

Next challenge: a machine that can can beat a human using an equal amount of energy.

_yosefk 9y ago
No problem beating most humans already. Beating the best human? How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Such humans are rare so you ought to count all the others as part of the cost of making the best human as you can't quite make them on demand (though Laslo Polgar might disagree). I don't get the energy point. The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. Doesn't that count for something? But your wish will come true. Go isn't a special snowflake. If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win.
- al_chemist 9y ago
  > How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? By your definition, on AI side we should add energy spent on creating AI and civilization that produced it.
  - piyush_soni 9y ago
    And also, there's a certain amount of 'healthcare' cost involved like with all other computers.
  - jayd16 9y ago
    I think he's amortizing the cost to zero for the AI because the marginal cost per additional AI is much lower than the cost to sustain a civilization to churn out and bin human go players.
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
  How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Did... you really just say that, about a process that requires not only a civilization, but one sufficiently decadent that it can afford to waste resources making silicon that turns burned coal into pointless game victories? The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. I think by your previous metrics, you should be counting the heathcare costs of the ops folks who run the hardware, and I guess the healthcare costs of their healthcare workers, ad nauseum.

loup-vaillant 9y ago

Some commenters on Twitter are still saying 0.5 points is "very close". It would be if both players were human: in human play, score differences tend to correlate with differences in actual skill, and probability of outcome (who wins the game). Not so with Alpha go. That machine just takes the surest path to victory, with no regards to its magnitude. It doesn't care about winning by only half a point. It cares about securing at least half a point. It may have been a crushing victory for all we know.

glandium 9y ago
It would be interesting to see how Alpha Go's performance varies with different goals, balancing between maximizing score and maximizing probability of winning.
- harshreality 9y ago
  I have to think they've discussed that internally, and they probably just want to make sure alphago can win consistently, period, before they start playing around with allowing slightly riskier moves as long as the win probability stays sufficiently above 50%. (But how much more? You can't know ahead of time how much stronger you are than the other player that day, or you wouldn't be playing, at least not for money.) It's just like adjusting komi to give the human an advantage, right?
  - glandium 9y ago
    An indirect way to do something similar-ish to what I was interested in would be to play with varying numbers of handicap stones with the current goal unchanged (maximizing probability of victory).
    - sanxiyn 9y ago
      Actually, this mostly works. http://pasky.or.cz/go/dynkomi.pdf http://pasky.or.cz/go/dynkomi.pdf has details how to do so.
9y ago

Macuyiko 9y ago

I hope the next focus for Deepmind will be on opening up the black box and trying to put some explainability aspects in place, as has been done before for other deep learning architectures (or at least, people are starting to play around with). So many questions of the form "I wish we could ask AlphaGo what is was thinking here" -- so this would be great to have.

orthoganol 9y ago
Probably something like "I've been trained on many similar past situations, these are possible moves that worked out well, let's simulate a few of them internally, OK, here's my move." Full disclosure, I really don't know much about the internals of DeepMind, but if it's just a DL system on steroids with sampling, there isn't really any 'thinking' happening, it's just tapping probability distros over possible moves conditioned on tons of training data.
- Macuyiko 9y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but there's more going on here than just inferencing over a database of prior knowledge. The game is too complex for that. Compare this approach for instance to Monte Carlo based approaches which aren't doing so well. Speaking of Monte Carlo, the Lee Sedol version of AlphaGo did combine a series of deep networks with Monte Carlo sampling, but rumor is that was replaced in this version altogether (it's also running on TPU's now). Would like to see some more technical details as well.
  - computerex 9y ago
    Their state of the art approach hybridizes MCTS with deep neural networks. I'd be interesting indeed if they manage to get better performance without MCTS all together, although they did achieve very impressive performance without MCTS.
- taneq 9y ago
  How do you define 'thinking' such that an artificial neural network can't do it, but a biological neural network can?

jsweojtj 9y ago

Does anyone know whether they isolate generations of AlphaGo and then recombine them after a while? Simulating something like, having Go being played in geographically distinct countries for years and then having the (perhaps many) traditions clash?

antome 9y ago
This is one of the common extentions to Genetic Algorithms. It does not sound as though they are not going to such extremes here, but it is a reasonable concept.

lz400 9y ago

In the other thread some people mentioned that Je Kie has already lost twice, 14-7 and 13-0, to another Go bot called FineArt (by Tencent)? odd that didn't get any exposure while everyone is watching this game so attentively. Assuming this information accurate, FineArt has already proven bots are above humans, that's moot. At this point if AlphaGo loses it only makes FineArt more impressive! The real match would be Tencent vs Deepmind.

wapz 9y ago
I believe FineArt was developed after Alpha Go..
- lz400 9y ago
  Still, seems playing humans is no longer very exciting. To me at least the interesting part is whether a company like Tencent can start after AlphaGo and still produce a better product than the arguably most recognized AI group in the world.
- gcp 9y ago
  I believe Google was developed after AltaVista..
fahadkhan 9y ago
"The real match would be Tencent vs Deepmind." I really like this, as it puts into to context that there is nothing artificial about the intelligence, it is the achievement teams of people.
- psyc 9y ago
  Like there's nothing artificial about this chair I made. It's just an expression of my capacity for sitting.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
9y ago

quakenul 9y ago

Can anyone shed light on the significance? AlphaGo already beat a top human quite decisively a few month ago. How is this different?

RubenSandwich 9y ago
This is different because while AlphaGo did beat Lee Sedol a while ago. Lee was ranked 2nd in the world for Go. Ke Jie, AlphaGo's current opponent, is ranked 1st in the world.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  He's also had more time and data to try develop anti-AI tactics and prepare against AlphaGo's strategy. While Sedol mostly went in blind.
  - alanfalcon 9y ago
    At the time there wasn't much expectation in the Go community that an AI could really compete at the top level, either. Everything is different now.
olegkikin 9y ago
Lee Sedol was not the top human, he was #4 when that happened, and now he's #7. Ke Jie was, and still is #1. https://www.goratings.org/en/ https://www.goratings.org/en/

rurban 9y ago

0.5 is not really decisive enough. Let's wait for the next games. Je Kie is really good, much better than in the training games online.

nightcracker 9y ago
AlphaGo does not distinguish between 0.5 points and 30 points. Its only objective is to win, and to absolutely secure the win. It doesn't care by how much it wins.
- rurban 9y ago
  No point in repeating the well-known. 0.5 is almost nothing, go is not just binary win or loose.
  - gcp 9y ago
    The match standings are 1-0 for AlphaGo, not +0.5 for AlphaGo.
  - inimino 9y ago
    It is exactly binary win or lose. In fact, 0.5 is exactly what you would expect a superhuman master to win by, every time, against a very strong opponent. (It's "lose" not "loose".)
  - namarie 9y ago
    It had a 10-15 point advantage in the middle game. It chose to whittle it away in the endgame in exchange for more safety. In my opinion that makes it even more impressive.
    - rurban 9y ago
      I'm aware of that. I'm also aware of the troubles in counting and evaluation of it's strange/bad moves. It's not impressive at all to go away with only 0.5 after such a large lead. Think about your confirmation bias a bit. Ke Jie knows that he will probably loose, but this will give him confidence. And confidence is what they need at most, much more than in chess. Otherwise Ke Jie will probably have to end his lucrative career. It not over yet.

dingo_bat 9y ago

LOL, apparently Chinese media has been ordered to censor all coverage of the loss.

deleted 9y ago
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dashedbanana 9y ago
Can you read Chinese? Every news site in China reported his loss. Try harder. I'll give you one of the biggest media sites. http://www.163.com/ http://www.163.com/ It's on headline. "人机大战首局柯洁苦战落败 AlphaGo胜1/4子暂1-0"
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  Oops, looks like I shouldn't rely on reddit for my news.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mazerackham 9y ago
    don't believe anything you hear about China, especially if it falls into the "Chinese Government is an evil overlord" bucket, or you'll end up looking like an idiot.
    - arthur2e5 9y ago
      They were ordered to censor the video livestream (only allowing text) just ~1d before the event though.[0] Rumor has that the censorship order explicitly called for avoiding mentioning Google in the text streams. A YouTube mirror video livestream on Bilibili has been taken down for unknown reasons. [0] http://archive.is/tTgsx http://archive.is/tTgsx (original page already gone) It might not be the gov't intending to act evil in this case -- it can be some random "old red army" hearing about Google's involvement in this thing and protesting. But no matter what the underlying reason is, they are defly trying to hide something they are not supposed to in order to make stuff look good. (They ain't no White Lotus.[1]) You don't need an evil overlord to do this; a narcissist will suffice. [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/白莲花/17505528 https://baike.baidu.com/item/白莲花/17505528

alexdowad 9y ago

A Go amateur's synopsis: it seemed like Ke was winning and it seemed like Ke was winning and then stuff got complicated and then AlphaGo won.

nopinsight 9y ago
This is a strategy a superintelligence could/would use if they want to take over. They know that humans do not trust them, so they make sure almost all humans with power feel in control for as long as possible. Then the situations may get complicated for a while with confusion and disagreements between humans during the transition. Then flip the switches. Note: I understand that the reason for the appearance that AlphaGo does not have a large margin earlier in the game is quite different. I simply see a plausible parallel with your observation regarding the game of Go and the scenario of superintelligence take over, if we develop them wrong.
- bmh100 9y ago
  The idea of a super-human strong AI is really just anthropomorphizing computer programs. The only realistic way this could occur is by emulating or uploading a human mind.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  I think this interpretation just stems from our insecurity as human beings when it comes to our own brain capacity. What I think is really going on (and what will actually happen if a "robot takeover" happens) is the computer just does its thing, but because it's so powerful, it's out of reach of any human being's understanding, and people think they are pulling some trick. Machines can win without using tricks just based on their computing power. Yesterday I heard one of the commentators say something like "what i liked about alphago today was how effortless it's playing. It's almost like it's just playing happily and not even trying hard, giving away losses happily when it comes to it." Alphago has no emotion, but just like how human beings look at something that walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and conclude it's a duck, humans interpret everything based on their point of view, thinking "I can actually feel what alphago is feeling, just based on its moves". Another thing they said was something like "there's a high level player premium", meaning when people play against other people, they can't ignore all the subtle little queues, such as how much time they're taking to come up with a move, whereas Ke Jie has no such thing against alphago because alphago doesn't care. (Whereas Ke Jie does care) I think if anything, that kind of emotional vulnerability is what will bring human down against machines.

tiktoktik 9y ago

This is good!

balliballi 9y ago

The new world order

mda 9y ago

I have a feeling that Lee Sedol's single win will be remembered as the first and the last instance of a human victory versus a strong AI in game of go.

gort 9y ago
There are other strong AIs out there now, Zen and Fine Art. Both are active on internet Go servers. They're still losing sometimes. But if you mean the last victory against the very strongest, you're probably right.
- mda 9y ago
  Yes, by strong, i meant alphago level.
- alanfalcon 9y ago
  Yes, I got that inpression in the moment watching game 4 last year: "We will never see this again." It remains to be proven empirically but that's why we're here.

RolandHo290339 9y ago

From the start Ke Jie had chosen the path of narrow but certain defeat, without himself knowing. Alphago knew it all the time and therefore let Ke Jie to take the course of euthanasia. The end result is a close defeat but it was a total defeat all the way.