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Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I
- scarmig 9y agoThe article makes a lot of PRC censors trying to subdue news about the match. How much of this is a real tendency or cultural fear? How much of it is just an attempt to kneecap Google/Alphabet?
- oldgun 9y agoGoogle's been blocked since ~2010, due to Google's refusal to block and censor search results that Chinese government considers 'inharmonic'.
- logicallee 9y agoI admit I don't know much about the situation there. So, in mainland China, for approxmiately 7 years, nobody could use Google's search engine, or gmail, for anything? (Barring extreme technical measures like tor / vpn and so forth)? Is this true? Could you talk about what the most common search engines in actual use are there? Obviously I am asking about this as a total outsider. I've never even been to China.
- yourapostasy 9y agoIt isn't just a search engine; there is an entire for-China-by-Chinese ecosystem [1]. To answer your direct question, yes, every Google online property is inaccessible within the PRC to non-registered commercial entities, and has been for the past 7 years. If you are a appropriately-registered commercial entity that can afford it, my understanding is dedicated lines (assumed monitored by the PRC) may be purchased with access to the outside world. [1] http://www.mandarinzone.com/top-10-popular-chinese-websites/ http://www.mandarinzone.com/top-10-popular-chinese-websites/ Edit: my apologies, bad wording. Kudos to xiaoma for catching my mistake, thank you 小马 (my guess at your name in 中文）。Today, all Google properties I'm aware of are blocked. The blocking was implemented gradually across Google properties over the past 7 years. The search engine has been blocked for the past 7 years, since the beginning of the block.
- logicallee 9y agoThanks for answering my direct question and for that link, which is exactly what I was curious about.
- xiaoma 9y agoGmail wasn't blocked until later.
- yourapostasy 9y ago谢谢！ Correction added to my post.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- analogist 9y agoEven conventional VPN is not enough. The Great Firewall of China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall) is a mix of DNS poisoning, deep packet inspection, and traffic and usage analysis based on real time ML. It is very smart and adaptive, and will block most mainstream VPN services, including IPSEC, standard OpenVPN, SSH tunnels, (of course) SOCKS and http proxies. Besides blocking entire sections of the net outright (like Google address blocks), poisoning controversial domains, etc, even if it can't directly inspect the traffic due to good encryption (say in the instance of OpenVPN or IPSEC), it will slowly degrade and eventually null-route your traffic over the course of minutes, depending on its judgement of the likelihood (based on packet structure and history) that your activity isn't "normal" usage. Currently the only functional ways of getting around the GFW is VPN through stunnel (TCP OpenVPN traffic re-wrapped in TLS, thus pretending to be https traffic, and incurring triple TCP performance penalties), similar convoluted protocols like Shadowsocks, obfsproxy, and other China specific tools.
- oldgun 9y agoIt started with the search engine and followed by all Google's services, including but certainly not limited to Blogger, Adwords, Play store, Gmail and so on. So Chinese students who were applying to foreign universities with a Gmail account would wake up one day and find they had difficulty accessing their own mailboxes. (Don't ask me how I knew it.) Last time I checked the only Google service available now seems to be the Google Translate. One project monitors how many popluar sites are blocked in China: https://en.greatfire.org/analyzer https://en.greatfire.org/analyzer Tor is also blocked so it takes a considerable amount of effort to make it work. VPNs and other measures (socket proxy, etc.) work but they're also sinfully slow, and it breaks all the time. The most common search engine there is Baidu: https://baidu.com https://baidu.com. Bing has some market share as well.
- prodikl 9y agomy wife, who's chinese, says its because china wanted to protected its own market. i'm sure censorship was a part of it, but think of 1 billion viewers and how much money that'd generate. the government decided that money should stay and circulate in china instead of going outside to google
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoMaybe it was an unholy synergy of both.
- Macuyiko 9y agoA little bit of both, I think, here is what was apparently send around: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-coverage-ke-jie-vs-alphago-games/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-covera... and in Chinese: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C%9F%E7%90%86%E9%83%A8%E3%80%91-%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8Calphago%E5%AF%B9%E5%BC%88/ http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C... "Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a live stream. If one has been announced in advance, please immediately withdraw it. Please convey the gist of this to sports channels. Again, we stress: this match may not be broadcast live in any form and without exception, including text commentary, photography, video streams, self-media accounts and so on. No website (including sports and technology channels) or desktop or mobile apps may issue news alerts or push notifications about the course or result of the match." Sounds pretty harsh... will be interesting to see how the rest of the event goes.
- jostmey 9y agoGee, even with Trump as president this makes me so happy I live in the United States
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yeukhon 9y agoI am not sure, but it's floating around. https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8CAlphaGo&oq=%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8CAlphaGo&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.143j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8CA... Sites like Sina and Sogou are able to report, and those aren't small sites. They got millions of views every day. That site you quoted is anti-PRC news site. Not trying to discredit, but it isn't a total ban. At least the result isn't and probably won't.
- CydeWeys 9y ago> Not trying to discredit, but it isn't a total ban. At least the result isn't and probably won't. That's the lowest bar in the world. It's a damn board game. The stream was six hours of two men sitting across a table from each other placing black and white stones. Optionally, some of the streams had commentators talking about how good the moves were as they were played. That such a thing could be subjected to censorship is absurd. As for the result not being censored, well, it's literally a single bit of information. That was only censored because it's not practical to do so.
- CriticalSection 9y agoThere is plenty of news coverage of this in China, both in English and in Chinese - http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-24/258802.shtml http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-24/258802.shtml http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-18/258072.shtml http://www.ecns.cn/2017/05-18/258072.shtml http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0523/c90000-9219327.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2017/0523/c90000-9219327.html I see claims everywhere that "China is censoring coverage of the match", but anyone can just click on those links and see that it is untrue.
- Jabbles 9y agoWhat was the point of hosting this in China?
- dpeck 9y agoThis represents a fairly major milestone in game A.I. doesn't it? I only took one A.I. class in school and had a few that involved games as projects and remember several times the lecturers/professors (10 years ago) mentioning that Go was a next level target after chess due to extremely high branching factor.
- lisper 9y agoYes. Of all common games that are deterministic and have no hidden state, GO has the largest search space. It's significantly larger than chess. So this is pretty much the end of that branch of research.
- kibwen 9y agoThank you for mentioning hidden state; I feel like a lot of laypersons have the impression that Go is the hardest game to solve, period, without realizing that it's in a specific class of games where the entire state of the game is evident just by looking at the board (and in addition: is a two-player game, where each player takes exactly one move per turn). I honestly wonder whether a game like Stratego, which is much less competitive than Go but has tons of hidden state, would be harder for current AI techniques to compete at. (EDIT: Specifically last year I was witness to a lot of threads regarding the quality of the AI in the video game Civilization 6 that asserted that poor AI in video games was no longer excusable since computers now beat experts at Go...)
- lisper 9y agoPoker is the canonical example of a hidden-state game and that has already fallen. https://www.wired.com/2017/01/mystery-ai-just-crushed-best-human-players-poker/ https://www.wired.com/2017/01/mystery-ai-just-crushed-best-h... The list of things that humans do better than computers is getting very short very fast.
- bluetwo 9y agoThat makes for a good headline but it's not actually true. AI beat humans in two-player, unlimited stakes, no-limit hold-em.
- mirimir 9y ago> He would treat the software more as a teacher, he said, to get inspiration and new ideas about moves. Interesting.
- spcelzrd 9y agoIn the future, only poets will have jobs. j/k someone will have to program the poets
- tonmoy 9y agohttp://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-artificial-intelligence-poetry http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-artificial-intelligenc...
- tzs 9y agoPoetry jobs are getting lost to outsourcing [1]. [1] http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html http://watleyreview.com/2003/111103-2.html
- emtel 9y agoSee "The First Sally -or- Trurl's Electronic Bard", page 12 of the pdf (43 of the book) http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Lem-cyberiad.pdf http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Lem... Keep in mind this is all a translation from Polish.
- alkdfhasf 9y agoLet's hope none us of will have 'jobs'.
- gene-h 9y agoAlphaGo has won one game out of three so far, it's not over yet.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jostmey 9y agoAlphaGo already won the first game, which 5 years ago would have been considered impossible. It is basically over. Google can pour an order of magnitude more computing power at the algorithm to boost its performance if they choose too.
- alanbernstein 9y agoI suppose that invites the next challenge, a machine that can defeat a human with no more power consumption than a meat brain uses.
- thomasahle 9y agoThe question of performance as a function of computing power is an interesting one. Demis Hassabis claims that the returns are diminishing quickly when going above the system they are using. In fact Alpha Go Ke Ji uses 10 times less power than Alpha Go Lee Sedol, though the architecture has changed to using Google's own TPUs, so it's not an easy comparison. In either case Alpha Go Ke Ji is said to be 3 stones stronger than Alpha Go Lee Sedol which the team claims comes nearly completely from algorithm improvements.
- jvolkman 9y agoGoogle has stated previously that the Lee Sedol variant also used TPUs.
- devy 9y agoIt's very likely that AlphaGo will won ALL three invidual games, the pair game and the team game, given all the commentaries that I've been reading in the past few days.
- jonbarker 9y agoHumans are still better on a watt per watt basis!
- deepnotderp 9y agoIf my company has its way, not for long ;)
- Diederich 9y ago"Going from the CPU to the GPU brought about enormous progress in Deep Learning. Now researchers grind their teeth against the constraints of the GPU. Vathys changes that." Indeed!
- polishTar 9y agoNot for much longer! Apparently this iteration of AlphaGo is using 10x less computational power than the version that beat Lee Sedol.
- jonbarker 9y agoInteresting, is there a link to this?
- forgot-my-pw 9y agohttps://youtu.be/Z-HL5nppBnM?t=21580 https://youtu.be/Z-HL5nppBnM?t=21580 More will be published by end of this week
- jhalstead 9y ago10x more efficient and this version ran on a single machine, per the press conference.
- WilliamDhalgren 9y agobut humans obtain their watts very very inefficiently, so there's prob at least an order of magnitude to give for the same kind of system-level efficiency. Consider a field to feed a human vs a PV installation of the same physical size. And ofc there's all the other ways to obtain electricity...
- SurrealSoul 9y agoI wonder how games will be 10~ years in the future. "Check the box to make sure you are human" will be the largest feature
- shaftway 9y agoClearly this checkbox will be AI's next target.
- dcx 9y agoThe game is available here for anyone interested - http://events.google.com/alphago2017/ http://events.google.com/alphago2017/ It's a half-point win which doesn't seem like a lot, but AlphaGo is intentionally taking lower-risk paths to lock down the win in exchange for some win margin. If you watch the actual game and some commentary, it really feels like AlphaGo is playing at the next level. Some of its moves are so inhuman and subtle. This is a very exciting time for Go; a lot of traditional wisdom has been shaken up in the last couple of years! I heard a story about a Korean pro study group that was doing nothing but studying AlphaGo's games for new insights for some time. I'm looking forward to seeing the future of play as extremely strong Go AI becomes more widely accessible.
- cjbprime 9y agoYes, it's exciting that a half point win gives us no bound on the strength difference betwen the human player and AlphaGo -- the human player could play "twice as well" and still lose by 0.5. The best way to test strength, assuming Ke Jie continues to lose, would be to start giving handicap stones until the winrate stabilizes. I'd guess that AlphaGo is no more than two stones stronger, but maybe that's just more bias towards humans..
- a13n 9y agoThis! This would give us an idea of "how much stronger?" rather than just answering the question "is it stronger?"
- mattnewton 9y agoIn the match commentary they talk about why no one is likely to take them up on that offer, because losing at a handicap would be devastating for the self confidence of a pro.
- CamperBob2 9y agoI don't understand that. Should an Olympic weightlifter lose confidence if he can't beat a forklift?
- perseusprime11 9y agoTomorrow there will be another story on flawed centaurs narrative which I never understand. How is the Human + AlphaGo > AlphaGo narrative not fail on smell test?
- haltingthoughts 9y agoThe space of playing go is rather large and humans only need to be better at a small portion of it to improve upon AlphaGo. Humans+Computer was better than just Computer for chess (at long time controls) for nearly 10 years after BigBlue beat Kasparov.
- perseusprime11 9y agoThat centaur narrative seems to have debunked a while back: http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=272 http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti...
- haltingthoughts 9y agoThat is for a recent tournament. Now computers are just better. But for up to 5-10 years centaurs were better. Eventually human Go players won't be able to improve on computer evaluations, but that is may not be for another few years.
- perseusprime11 9y agoLet's see. I think there are some centaur like tournaments going on for AlphaGo as well.
- taylorwc 9y agoAndrej Karpathy had some awesome tweets on this yesterday, you can see the thread in the links, but these two were my favorite: "Yes AlphaGo only won by 0.5, but it was not at all a close game. It's an artifact of its training objective."[0] and: "it prefers to win by 0.5 with 99.9999999% chance instead of 10.0 with 99.99% chance."[1] [0]https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985 [1]https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121 https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121
- bpodgursky 9y agoI know it's a totally different game, but it would be interesting to see AlphaGo play a game optimized for expected number of points, instead of low variance wins. I assume it would require retraining.
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- BoiledCabbage 9y agoI would really love to see an AlphaGo with even the minimal tweak of maximize points while maintaining win % > 95%. I really wouldn't be shocked in those final moves it was optimizing for 5 or 6 "9"s of success probability. Which will still true to programming, it also obfuscates how good it really it. That said, there is some benefit to not completely embarrassing your human player who previously was known as the best, but has volunteered to be beaten repeatedly on international TV. Going into this Ke Jie knew he was going to lose, and still agreed. Speaking as an inexperienced go player, I would not be shocked if the new Alpha Go were 500-1000 Elo points better than Ke Jie. It's true skill being masked by its ultra-conservative style of play. The original AlphaGo only lost a single game to Lee Sedol that was essentially just a bug, not because it was "weaker". DeepMind has said this completely retrained AlphaGo is significantly stronger than the original. [1] Partial support for the possibly 1000 pt Elo advantage of Alpha Go. http://en.chessbase.com/post/alphago-vs-lee-sedol-history-in-the-making http://en.chessbase.com/post/alphago-vs-lee-sedol-history-in...
- derialstrazus 9y agoIt's so accurate to call this a Sputnik moment for China. I wonder if we'll see a face off between AlphaGo and a Chinese Go AI sometime in the future.
- Stanleyc23 9y agoyea totally agree. the fact that state media shut down the broadcast speaks to some loss of face. Something organized in good spirits like an AI Olympics would be amazing to watch.
- partycoder 9y agoAccording to Deepmind, this version of Alpha Go (aka Master) is 3 stones stronger than the version that defeated Lee Sedol. Prior to this match it had a 60-0 record against high professional dans (on faster game settings, but still). Right now it would be something like a 13-dan pro, almost impossible to beat. The natural occurrence of a human being capable of defeating a bot like this would be very rare, and would take decades to train. In the case of this bot, you just set up a cluster and deploy the same software, to produce as many instances of this bot as you want in less than a day. In this sense, AI has a huge advantage. Finally, by the time a human being can beat this version of the bot, there is going to be a much stronger version.
- forgot-my-pw 9y agoI would like to see the next game with 1 stone handicap and the 3rd game with 3 stone handicap. But Ke Jie probably will take that as an insult.
- partycoder 9y agoI don't know about that. While it might not be very gratifying to lose to a computer, players often enjoy the opportunity to play stronger players and learn something new. Then, the way to be a professional 9 dan involves a lot of losing and frustration. I don't think he is very thin-skinned in this respect.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoNow limit AlphaGo to the same power budget and see who wins.
- CobrastanJorji 9y agoA human eats maybe 2500 calories per day, right? That's about 100 watts, I think? That's a pretty serious restriction.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kllrnohj 9y ago2500 kcals/day would be around 121 watts, yeah. But computers have much lower idle consumption than humans. So if we assume alphago idles at ~45w that would consume around 1000 kcal for 21 hours leaving 1500 kcal for the 3 hours it was given to think which would be more like 580 watts. That sounds pretty doable.
- jjaredsimpson 9y agoHumans should just use more power. But they can't which is why machines are superior.
- adventured 9y agoHumans can use more power, they're just a lot more limited in their potential. Michael Phelps gets up to like 400 watts per day while at peak training.
- jjaredsimpson 9y agoWhat's the difference between having a limited potential and being inferior?
- harlemfool7 9y agothe end is nigh
- Apofis 9y agoI, for one, look forward to more articles starting with "It isn’t looking good for humanity." in the coming decades.
- deegles 9y agoIt would be awesome if AlphaGo were released as an online-playable version but with an adaptive difficulty. Either by choosing a desired rank or just setting it to "try to win %50 of the time" or similar. I feel like that would lead to a new generation of players trained on new strategies from a blank slate. Could be interesting. Disclosure: I only know the basics about playing Go :)
- paki123 9y agoYou think somebody is already making this?
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- maverick_iceman 9y agoIs Ke Jie ranked higher than Lee Sedol? I thought Sedol was world's #1 Go player.
- yters 9y agoOnce we have AI writing AI, then we can say AI is on par with humans.
- JosephLark 9y agoThat seems like an odd version of the AI Effect [0], where "when a technique reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- yters 9y agoAI is a vague term. What we are trying to do is capture the human mind's ability to solve problems in general. Otherwise it's like solving a crossword puzzle and calling the solution AI. It's the solving that is of interest not the solution. These game playing algorithms are all trained on human games with algorithms designed by humans. The only computer contribution is the ability to churn through permutations really quickly, which is not intelligence. Intelligence is the reduction in state space so it is small enough for the churning to be of value. No AI can do this state space reduction for us yet. We always need a human.
- nopinsight 9y agoPeople who believe that AGI is too far away to be concerned about should keep in mind that very few people, even AI enthusiasts and experts, predicted 5 years ago that we would have a human-pro-level Go playing program now. Prior to 2015, no programs could compete evenly with any among hundreds of Go professionals. Two years later, even the human World Champion admits that his competency is far below that of a computer program. "I am quite convinced by this loss that AlphaGo is really strong. From AlphaGo there are lots of things that are worthwhile learning and exploring." -- Ke Jie The time to start working on and funding AI Safety research is now. Note: I am not saying that AGI is imminent. The point is that we do NOT know when it will emerge and AI Safety research is very difficult and will likely take a long time to complete.
- alkdfhasf 9y agoThis means as much in terms of progress towards AGI as did DeepBlue's win over Kasparov.
- red023 9y agoWhy is this stuff so hyped? It does not surprise me at all. A computer can calculate every step in milliseconds. Whats so surprising? When did the first chess computer beat the world champion? 50 years ago?