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I remember vividly in 1997 when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, and I was a competitive chess player. The mystique of the game was immediately lost for me, and I

I remember vividly in 1997 when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, and I was a competitive chess player. The mystique of the game was immediately lost for me, and I never found the passion for the game that I once had. My heart goes out to the sea of Go players now searching for meaning in the game. At the very least we can take this signal as a true indicator that our world is close to being completely upheaved by intelligent machines, in all areas of intellectual pursuit.

blazespin 9y ago
Bit hyperbolic. Go at it's heart is a pretty basic game, just tricky combinatorics. The fact that you can do unsupervised learning simplifies it even more. I think there are much better true indicators, such as better translation, speech to text, auto driving, etc.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > Go at it's heart is a pretty basic game, just tricky combinatorics. This goes for every turn based game and a lot of card games as well. If you just had perfect memory you'd be a formidable chess and cards player.
  - gabrielgoh 9y ago
    in a way, life is just a simple game with tricky combinatorics, and fairly trivial to attack with the tools of unsupervised learning.
    - panic 9y ago
      Life isn't simple in the way these games are. The choices you have in life aren't clear, and neither is what will happen once you make them.
      - Tar90 9y ago
        Plus, these games are deterministic, whereas everything in life is a stochastic process.
        andrepd 9y ago
        Only because you lack information.
        baq 9y ago
        Actually at the lowest level there's this whole quantum business that says exactly otherwise.
        andrepd 9y ago
        That is unlikely to affect the microscopic world. The physics of everyday life are deterministic, no need to invoke quantum mechanics.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        GGGP didn't do that, they made a link with chaos theory and that's decidedly not deterministic. And I think you meant to say 'macroscopic'.
        andrepd 9y ago
        GGGP? And yes, I did mean macroscopic, sorry.
- computerex 9y ago
  I think you are being hyperbolic here. Go is in a lot of respect much more challenging than machine translation, speech to text and auto-driving. All of the latter problems you described have had solutions for decades whereas Alpha Go is literally state of the art. It even uses proprietary hardware (TPU's) and was essentially engineered by one if not the most elite ML lab in the world. Their solution consists of an ensemble of many models including MCTS, supervised learning, reinforcement learning. Much more complicated than what you are thinking. Go read the paper, it's free. Go is a lot harder than you think for machines to play.
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    I'm not disagreeing because I don't know how to even start comparing those challenges to Go, but just a comment - it's interesting that you chose areas where Google's elite ML teams are state of the art or close to it and where they're probably using TPUs or will be soon.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cybiote 9y ago
    I agree, Go is a challenging game for computers but even more so for humans. However, for computers, Go is not more challenging than translation, speech to text or driving or understanding a comic book. The progression of superhuman play in famous board games has gone as checker->chess-> go. The more a game relies on memory,tactics and evaluation speed, the quicker it falls. In terms of commonly played perfect information games, Go is most difficult both from having a large branching factor and no simple evaluation heuristic. In each of these, before there was superhuman play, there was super amateur human play for decades (including in Go). Translation still has many failure cases. Speech to text cannot yet handle intonation and auto-driving cannot yet handle driving in places like India. And reading then summarizing a page of a comic book while walking across a room is currently impossible.
    - NhanH 9y ago
      10 years ago when I was learning Go. I can beat the strongest bot within months of learning the rule. Super amateur human play in Go AI is barely 5 years ago, if that.
grondilu 9y ago
The computer supremacy certainly took something out of chess, but it also added a lot : it makes checking tactics trivial even for amateurs, it enormously enriched opening theory, and it made learning much easier for players of all levels (even Grand Masters).
- SuperPaintMan 9y ago
  Disclaimer: Mostly play at club level and in parks with randoms for cigarette bets What I've seen is a move away from attempting to understand why a given position was faulty in the first place, instead running a game through a engine and using that as an arbiter of correct/inadvisable moves. While effective it just feels, sterile. Give me romantic play or burn my board.
probably_wrong 9y ago
There are several activities right now that people keep doing despite machines being better suited: martial arts (and more in point, HEMA[1]), handicrafts, several Olympic sports. Why would anyone attempt to run a marathon under two hours, when any car can do it in 30 minutes? I think the answer lies less in "I will be the absolute best", and more along the lines of "I will do it better than anyone before me". And sometimes, even "I will do my best" is an excellent reason for doing things. I don't think Go players were in it due to a need for expertise that machines could not fulfill until now. And if people nowadays keep practicing with swords several centuries after the invention of firearms, Go players will do just fine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_European_martial_arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_European_martial_ar...
- matt4077 9y ago
  It does feel like there's a difference–maybe Go and Chess are just so much closer to what defines humanity than any physical sports?
  - binarymax 9y ago
    Yes and physical prowess was never dominated by humans anyway. We are surrounded by creatures which can fly and swim and sprint far better than any human ever could. But our minds is what separates us from the beasts. We've never been second place in the thought competition.
    - namarie 9y ago
      Aren't we actually better at endurance running than any other animal?
      - agildehaus 9y ago
        I think so. It's all about heat regulation: we have far more sweat glands than any other species, even our ape ancestors.
      - 9y ago
dingledog 9y ago
I, too, remember this. I'm very close to the chess engine scene, and while people (such as replies to this thread) have tried to argue that engine development has not taken away from chess, I'm afraid their misguided. Anybody paying attention to top level chess knows that it has turned into mind bogglingly boring forced draw lines due to engine analysis. I've seen super GMs argue that analysis is so deep now that "e4" openings for white may be unplayable due to how rapidly black can equalize. Romantic play has been all but squeezed out of chess, which is why there has been renewed demand for blitz chess and murmurs that it may one day supplant standard chess as the main World Championship. The replies miss out that improvements in, say, automobile speed don't impact how marathon runners run their races. But improvements in AI due modify how cognitive (rather than physical) games are played. There is a trade off that is unavoidable. I imagine Go will now become over analyzed just like chess where the top players memorize spreadsheets full of opening moves. Fortunately, there are variants of chess like Zhouse, which still appear too complex for engine to dominate any position (although they will defeat any human), and for which nearly every move is romantic still.
- namarie 9y ago
  Actually, draws are almost impossible in Go. I also doubt that pros will try to memorize openings like chess players would; they're very different games and this sort of opening memorization is way more important and efficient in chess than in go.
  - Wildgoose 9y ago
    Not true. If komi (the extra points given to White for going second) doesn't include an extra half point then draws are perfectly possible. One of my friends managed to get two jigo games (draws) out of the three games he played at a recent Tournament.
bamboozled 9y ago
Fish are way better at swimming than humans, it's still great fun. I don't get it.
nathan_f77 9y ago
> our world is close to being completely upheaved by intelligent machines, in all areas of intellectual pursuit I could see myself losing the passion for software engineering and design if an AI can do it better. That would have to be a general AI, and hopefully another couple of decades away. I wonder if I could enjoy movies or books written by an AI. Scary to think about the psychological manipulation it would be capable of, especially if it lives inside a Google or Facebook datacenter.
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  I think I read recently that Google is attacking the problem of deep learning nets writing the network and model specifications for new nets. I will try to find a reference for that. EDIT: this is not the same article I saw before, but same topic: https://futurism.com/googles-new-ai-is-better-at-creating-ai-than-the-companys-engineers/ https://futurism.com/googles-new-ai-is-better-at-creating-ai...
  - nojvek 9y ago
    I strongly believe AI will become a part of us like an external brain. Today we already have phones augmenting humans. Those smart phones will keep getting smarter and smarter.
    - BoiledCabbage 9y ago
      Yes, but that period won't last long. Pretty soon the benefits of having all of that computing ability, unrestrained by human limitations will simply be too great to ignore. And just like it happened in Chess, some form of intelligent agent will be the absolute strongest, and humans will have a playground to move in. If right now, a hypothetical space aliens came to earth and said play one chess game for the survival of your planet, we'd absolutely put forward our strongest chess computer. Not a computer suggesting moves and a human ultimately choosing, but a computer to play the full game. This thinking will gradually seep down into less and less important tasks as costs go down, until they're used to analyze/decide/pick everything. Would you pick your own stocks when your AI can do it better? Would you choose your own health care plan when an AI can choose better? "Hey AI, I need a diet that wil work. You know my psychology, you know my will power, favorite foods, pick my food for me for the next 2 months." Then "do my job for me and give me the pay", "help my kid get better as soccer", "organize my schedule", "run my life for me". And don't think it won't happen. People are too competitive. It will be looked at oddly at first, but people will see the results and then feel they're being left behind if they don't do it too.
miiw 9y ago
Speak for yourself. I paint because I like to paint. It doesn't matter to me if the spectrum of painting technique or theory has been fully explored. You are expressing a highly misguided viewpoint about what it means to be in touch with beauty. Nobody has the capacity to build the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal today. So what? Architects haven't shut shop.
ufmace 9y ago
This reminds me of Iain Banks' Culture series, where society is ruled by super-intelligent AIs and drones with intelligence roughly equivalent to people. It isn't really a theme of the stories, more of an undercurrent, but there is an element of humans trying to figure out what their place and purpose is in a society where machines can do literally everything much better than they can.
- visarga 9y ago
  Humans get to do AIs dirty work.
pmontra 9y ago
I played at the local go club this afternoon. Nobody has a problem with AlphaGo and the mystique of the game. Everybody knew go was about to be conquered, even the younger pros. We didn't expect it to happen so quickly but IMHO the sooner the better: we're going to have great tools to analyze games and maybe get better at the game. We're playing against people anyway and it's a great game.
zem 9y ago
I'm a competitive scrabble player, and I suspect it will be less than a decade (and possibly well less) before we have an AI that comfortably outclasses the best human players. (It might never be "unbeatable" due to the luck factor, but it could well, e.g. win 29 games out of every 30). However, it won't affect my enjoyment of the game in any way - it's already clear that board games in general are solvable by an "explore lots of moves with many levels of lookahead" strategy; the thrill lies in the fact that humans playing across a board clearly have to use different techniques to achieve the same result, and you're competing against other humans to see who can do it best. Indeed, much of the current excitement around AI playing programs lies in the fact that computers are too slow to do the exhaustive brute force tree search either; they need a lot of very clever valuation and pruning techniques to explore more of the tree in less time. It's just a different form of cleverness than what humans do, and there is a lot of feedback between the two communities, with human players helping programmers identify good heuristics, and then computer players uncovering new possibilities for humans to incorporate into their play.
- mrob 9y ago
  How good does it have to be to count as "comfortably outclasses"? Wikipedia claims Maven (Scrabble AI) was beating top humans in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven_%28Scrabble%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven_%28Scrabble%29
  - zem 9y ago
    top humans have been improving too; i'd estimate that quackle is stronger than most human players today, but the very best (especially nigel richards! https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richards-the-best-scrabble-player-on-earth/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richar...) can hold their own against it. i'd like to see the top-level-human win rate drop below 25% before i'd call us decisively outmatched, and below 10% before it hits the "don't even expect to win a game unless you're an expert" stage. also, there's an (afaik) unexplored area of scrabble AI where you take into account the fact that some plays are harder to spot than others, and some words less likely to be in your scrabble vocabulary, so if you're playing a weaker opponent you can play risky moves that might cost you against an expert but will win big against a weaker player. unlike in go, this really matters because tournament scrabble uses spread as a tiebreaker; learning how to not just win but win big against weaker players is an important skill in some tournaments.

blazespin 9y ago

Bit hyperbolic. Go at it's heart is a pretty basic game, just tricky combinatorics. The fact that you can do unsupervised learning simplifies it even more. I think there are much better true indicators, such as better translation, speech to text, auto driving, etc.

jacquesm 9y ago
> Go at it's heart is a pretty basic game, just tricky combinatorics. This goes for every turn based game and a lot of card games as well. If you just had perfect memory you'd be a formidable chess and cards player.
- gabrielgoh 9y ago
  in a way, life is just a simple game with tricky combinatorics, and fairly trivial to attack with the tools of unsupervised learning.
  - panic 9y ago
    Life isn't simple in the way these games are. The choices you have in life aren't clear, and neither is what will happen once you make them.
    - Tar90 9y ago
      Plus, these games are deterministic, whereas everything in life is a stochastic process.
      - andrepd 9y ago
        Only because you lack information.
        baq 9y ago
        Actually at the lowest level there's this whole quantum business that says exactly otherwise.
        andrepd 9y ago
        That is unlikely to affect the microscopic world. The physics of everyday life are deterministic, no need to invoke quantum mechanics.
        jacquesm 9y ago
        GGGP didn't do that, they made a link with chaos theory and that's decidedly not deterministic. And I think you meant to say 'macroscopic'.
        andrepd 9y ago
        GGGP? And yes, I did mean macroscopic, sorry.
computerex 9y ago
I think you are being hyperbolic here. Go is in a lot of respect much more challenging than machine translation, speech to text and auto-driving. All of the latter problems you described have had solutions for decades whereas Alpha Go is literally state of the art. It even uses proprietary hardware (TPU's) and was essentially engineered by one if not the most elite ML lab in the world. Their solution consists of an ensemble of many models including MCTS, supervised learning, reinforcement learning. Much more complicated than what you are thinking. Go read the paper, it's free. Go is a lot harder than you think for machines to play.
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  I'm not disagreeing because I don't know how to even start comparing those challenges to Go, but just a comment - it's interesting that you chose areas where Google's elite ML teams are state of the art or close to it and where they're probably using TPUs or will be soon.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Cybiote 9y ago
  I agree, Go is a challenging game for computers but even more so for humans. However, for computers, Go is not more challenging than translation, speech to text or driving or understanding a comic book. The progression of superhuman play in famous board games has gone as checker->chess-> go. The more a game relies on memory,tactics and evaluation speed, the quicker it falls. In terms of commonly played perfect information games, Go is most difficult both from having a large branching factor and no simple evaluation heuristic. In each of these, before there was superhuman play, there was super amateur human play for decades (including in Go). Translation still has many failure cases. Speech to text cannot yet handle intonation and auto-driving cannot yet handle driving in places like India. And reading then summarizing a page of a comic book while walking across a room is currently impossible.
  - NhanH 9y ago
    10 years ago when I was learning Go. I can beat the strongest bot within months of learning the rule. Super amateur human play in Go AI is barely 5 years ago, if that.

grondilu 9y ago

The computer supremacy certainly took something out of chess, but it also added a lot : it makes checking tactics trivial even for amateurs, it enormously enriched opening theory, and it made learning much easier for players of all levels (even Grand Masters).

SuperPaintMan 9y ago
Disclaimer: Mostly play at club level and in parks with randoms for cigarette bets What I've seen is a move away from attempting to understand why a given position was faulty in the first place, instead running a game through a engine and using that as an arbiter of correct/inadvisable moves. While effective it just feels, sterile. Give me romantic play or burn my board.

probably_wrong 9y ago

There are several activities right now that people keep doing despite machines being better suited: martial arts (and more in point, HEMA[1]), handicrafts, several Olympic sports. Why would anyone attempt to run a marathon under two hours, when any car can do it in 30 minutes? I think the answer lies less in "I will be the absolute best", and more along the lines of "I will do it better than anyone before me". And sometimes, even "I will do my best" is an excellent reason for doing things. I don't think Go players were in it due to a need for expertise that machines could not fulfill until now. And if people nowadays keep practicing with swords several centuries after the invention of firearms, Go players will do just fine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_European_martial_arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_European_martial_ar...

matt4077 9y ago
It does feel like there's a difference–maybe Go and Chess are just so much closer to what defines humanity than any physical sports?
- binarymax 9y ago
  Yes and physical prowess was never dominated by humans anyway. We are surrounded by creatures which can fly and swim and sprint far better than any human ever could. But our minds is what separates us from the beasts. We've never been second place in the thought competition.
  - namarie 9y ago
    Aren't we actually better at endurance running than any other animal?
    - agildehaus 9y ago
      I think so. It's all about heat regulation: we have far more sweat glands than any other species, even our ape ancestors.
    - 9y ago

dingledog 9y ago

I, too, remember this. I'm very close to the chess engine scene, and while people (such as replies to this thread) have tried to argue that engine development has not taken away from chess, I'm afraid their misguided. Anybody paying attention to top level chess knows that it has turned into mind bogglingly boring forced draw lines due to engine analysis. I've seen super GMs argue that analysis is so deep now that "e4" openings for white may be unplayable due to how rapidly black can equalize. Romantic play has been all but squeezed out of chess, which is why there has been renewed demand for blitz chess and murmurs that it may one day supplant standard chess as the main World Championship. The replies miss out that improvements in, say, automobile speed don't impact how marathon runners run their races. But improvements in AI due modify how cognitive (rather than physical) games are played. There is a trade off that is unavoidable. I imagine Go will now become over analyzed just like chess where the top players memorize spreadsheets full of opening moves. Fortunately, there are variants of chess like Zhouse, which still appear too complex for engine to dominate any position (although they will defeat any human), and for which nearly every move is romantic still.

namarie 9y ago
Actually, draws are almost impossible in Go. I also doubt that pros will try to memorize openings like chess players would; they're very different games and this sort of opening memorization is way more important and efficient in chess than in go.
- Wildgoose 9y ago
  Not true. If komi (the extra points given to White for going second) doesn't include an extra half point then draws are perfectly possible. One of my friends managed to get two jigo games (draws) out of the three games he played at a recent Tournament.

bamboozled 9y ago

Fish are way better at swimming than humans, it's still great fun. I don't get it.

nathan_f77 9y ago

> our world is close to being completely upheaved by intelligent machines, in all areas of intellectual pursuit I could see myself losing the passion for software engineering and design if an AI can do it better. That would have to be a general AI, and hopefully another couple of decades away. I wonder if I could enjoy movies or books written by an AI. Scary to think about the psychological manipulation it would be capable of, especially if it lives inside a Google or Facebook datacenter.

mark_l_watson 9y ago
I think I read recently that Google is attacking the problem of deep learning nets writing the network and model specifications for new nets. I will try to find a reference for that. EDIT: this is not the same article I saw before, but same topic: https://futurism.com/googles-new-ai-is-better-at-creating-ai-than-the-companys-engineers/ https://futurism.com/googles-new-ai-is-better-at-creating-ai...
- nojvek 9y ago
  I strongly believe AI will become a part of us like an external brain. Today we already have phones augmenting humans. Those smart phones will keep getting smarter and smarter.
  - BoiledCabbage 9y ago
    Yes, but that period won't last long. Pretty soon the benefits of having all of that computing ability, unrestrained by human limitations will simply be too great to ignore. And just like it happened in Chess, some form of intelligent agent will be the absolute strongest, and humans will have a playground to move in. If right now, a hypothetical space aliens came to earth and said play one chess game for the survival of your planet, we'd absolutely put forward our strongest chess computer. Not a computer suggesting moves and a human ultimately choosing, but a computer to play the full game. This thinking will gradually seep down into less and less important tasks as costs go down, until they're used to analyze/decide/pick everything. Would you pick your own stocks when your AI can do it better? Would you choose your own health care plan when an AI can choose better? "Hey AI, I need a diet that wil work. You know my psychology, you know my will power, favorite foods, pick my food for me for the next 2 months." Then "do my job for me and give me the pay", "help my kid get better as soccer", "organize my schedule", "run my life for me". And don't think it won't happen. People are too competitive. It will be looked at oddly at first, but people will see the results and then feel they're being left behind if they don't do it too.

miiw 9y ago

Speak for yourself. I paint because I like to paint. It doesn't matter to me if the spectrum of painting technique or theory has been fully explored. You are expressing a highly misguided viewpoint about what it means to be in touch with beauty. Nobody has the capacity to build the Pyramids or the Taj Mahal today. So what? Architects haven't shut shop.

ufmace 9y ago

This reminds me of Iain Banks' Culture series, where society is ruled by super-intelligent AIs and drones with intelligence roughly equivalent to people. It isn't really a theme of the stories, more of an undercurrent, but there is an element of humans trying to figure out what their place and purpose is in a society where machines can do literally everything much better than they can.

visarga 9y ago
Humans get to do AIs dirty work.

pmontra 9y ago

I played at the local go club this afternoon. Nobody has a problem with AlphaGo and the mystique of the game. Everybody knew go was about to be conquered, even the younger pros. We didn't expect it to happen so quickly but IMHO the sooner the better: we're going to have great tools to analyze games and maybe get better at the game. We're playing against people anyway and it's a great game.

zem 9y ago

I'm a competitive scrabble player, and I suspect it will be less than a decade (and possibly well less) before we have an AI that comfortably outclasses the best human players. (It might never be "unbeatable" due to the luck factor, but it could well, e.g. win 29 games out of every 30). However, it won't affect my enjoyment of the game in any way - it's already clear that board games in general are solvable by an "explore lots of moves with many levels of lookahead" strategy; the thrill lies in the fact that humans playing across a board clearly have to use different techniques to achieve the same result, and you're competing against other humans to see who can do it best. Indeed, much of the current excitement around AI playing programs lies in the fact that computers are too slow to do the exhaustive brute force tree search either; they need a lot of very clever valuation and pruning techniques to explore more of the tree in less time. It's just a different form of cleverness than what humans do, and there is a lot of feedback between the two communities, with human players helping programmers identify good heuristics, and then computer players uncovering new possibilities for humans to incorporate into their play.

mrob 9y ago
How good does it have to be to count as "comfortably outclasses"? Wikipedia claims Maven (Scrabble AI) was beating top humans in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven_%28Scrabble%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven_%28Scrabble%29
- zem 9y ago
  top humans have been improving too; i'd estimate that quackle is stronger than most human players today, but the very best (especially nigel richards! https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richards-the-best-scrabble-player-on-earth/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richar...) can hold their own against it. i'd like to see the top-level-human win rate drop below 25% before i'd call us decisively outmatched, and below 10% before it hits the "don't even expect to win a game unless you're an expert" stage. also, there's an (afaik) unexplored area of scrabble AI where you take into account the fact that some plays are harder to spot than others, and some words less likely to be in your scrabble vocabulary, so if you're playing a weaker opponent you can play risky moves that might cost you against an expert but will win big against a weaker player. unlike in go, this really matters because tournament scrabble uses spread as a tiebreaker; learning how to not just win but win big against weaker players is an important skill in some tournaments.