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Full disclosure, I've never played go in real life. In fact only a handful of times on the family computer back in the early 90's (i486). Back then I had 0 unde

Full disclosure, I've never played go in real life. In fact only a handful of times on the family computer back in the early 90's (i486). Back then I had 0 understanding about the complexity of the game but now I can appreciate it. Now, going away from this and into the following statement: > said his retirement was primarily motivated by the invincibility of AI Go programs I have a slight problem with that line of thoughts. Yes, there is undoubtedly a program that is thrashing humans left and right day in and day out. But I don't see why that would motivate someone to quit/retire. AI, in this day and age, to me at least, is still basically curve fitting. The fact that humans have figured out to do that in N-dimensional spaces (even with very large values of N), does not in any way undermine someone's effort and time dedicated to learning how to do a task. I'm sure that in several years someone will build an "AI" that can drive a modern Formula 1 car and it will smash all records and the best drivers without any efforts. And when that happens, should we abolish motorsports? Or sports in general? As humans we are confined to the limits of our biological abilities and personally I'm fine with that. I don't know who the first trillionaire will be, but I'm willing to bet that someone who figures out a way to interact with those models efficiently has a good chance. Essentially build a fast, all-accessible interface between the biological and digital world, which doesn't involve the traditional digital inputs(keyboard, screen, mouse, etc), and you have access to a decision making superpower at your disposal 24/7. When (and if) that happens, this is where games will cease to have any point. That's when it will boil down to who has the best hardware and software running along them rather than who is the best. Until then - game on!

seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Consider math. It used to be that people who could do large calculations quickly in their heads were considered super useful. Now with computers and calculators, people who can do that are interesting as a novelty, but not much more than that. I wonder if people just don’t like being inferior at something even if the comparison is a machine?
karmakaze 7y ago
I saw this coming even before Alpha Go won 4/5 games vs Lee Sedol. Imagine if you worked all your life to be the best software developer in the world and won all official competitive tournaments with spectators in the field. Then along comes some newfangled ML that not only writes programs faster than you, but the programs are qualitatively orders of magnitude better organized and using algorithms you could only begin to imagine. If your interest is in what's the best, you may as well stop and switch to ML research. The comparison to sports isn't 1:1 as sports is about physical biological limits vs games which are more about the thought processes. Also human+AlphaZero < AlphaZero so why would I spectate a human+machine vs human+machine match? Much later when it's commonplace for machines to be better than people at many things, things will change back, like we're amazed to watch people recite digits or make numerical computations.
- axegon_ 7y ago
  Kind of apples to oranges. Many people have tried to build models to write code. And while some have managed to make some progress, compared to us, the structures and algorithms are crap at best. Even though those NN's are RNN's, you can look at GAN's for an analogy: they can make some really photo-realistic images but there is a problem - the fact that you can't give them well defined rules: "cats have 4 legs and 1 tail", "people most commonly have two eyes with matching eye colour" or "cars are symmetrical". Until there's a solution to that, I doubt we'll see a machine writing good code. But to be fair, I'd be incredibly excited to see one - that opens up so many doors - we could start finding cures for incurable deseases and cures for deseases we know very little about, accelerate every aspect of our lives - space exploration, climate change, aging, transportation and so on. If anything, seeing a model that writes code a thousand times better than I ever would, will not discourage me from writing code. Far from it, I would do anything I'm physically and mentally capable of to be a part of it. As for when it's commonplace - yes and no. It's like knowing 60 digits of pi - it works as a party trick but other than that I don't see any real value. But again - I think we are really far away from that and I consider those thoughts to be my personal speculations at best. Only time will tell.
  - karmakaze 7y ago
    Machines don't need these rules. Cars don't need to be symmetrical any more than an antenna or other structure[0]. This is exactly analogous to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero played strange bad-looking moves. [0] https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-alien-look-of-deep-learning-generative-design-5c5f871f7d10 https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-alien-look-of-deep-l...
drdeca 7y ago
I feel like “still basically curve fitting” may be underselling emotion-wise how powerful “curve fitting” is. Is there any computational task which couldn’t be done through something which could be called “curve fitting”? “Curve fitting” just means “approximating a function”, yeah? And what is a computational task other than computing a function, or some generalization of functions (e.g. could involve randomness or interactivity or the like as well) Now, yes, current AI doesn’t yet have a model of the world including it being embedded in the world, and such that it chooses actions in order to further goals. But, I don’t see why such a thing fundamentally couldn’t be accomplished using what one might call “curve fitting”. If Strong AI could potentially be accomplished using “curve fitting”, I’m not sure that it makes sense to say things like “merely curve fitting”. Though, you didn’t say “just” or “merely”.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Consider math. It used to be that people who could do large calculations quickly in their heads were considered super useful. Now with computers and calculators, people who can do that are interesting as a novelty, but not much more than that. I wonder if people just don’t like being inferior at something even if the comparison is a machine?

karmakaze 7y ago

I saw this coming even before Alpha Go won 4/5 games vs Lee Sedol. Imagine if you worked all your life to be the best software developer in the world and won all official competitive tournaments with spectators in the field. Then along comes some newfangled ML that not only writes programs faster than you, but the programs are qualitatively orders of magnitude better organized and using algorithms you could only begin to imagine. If your interest is in what's the best, you may as well stop and switch to ML research. The comparison to sports isn't 1:1 as sports is about physical biological limits vs games which are more about the thought processes. Also human+AlphaZero < AlphaZero so why would I spectate a human+machine vs human+machine match? Much later when it's commonplace for machines to be better than people at many things, things will change back, like we're amazed to watch people recite digits or make numerical computations.

axegon_ 7y ago
Kind of apples to oranges. Many people have tried to build models to write code. And while some have managed to make some progress, compared to us, the structures and algorithms are crap at best. Even though those NN's are RNN's, you can look at GAN's for an analogy: they can make some really photo-realistic images but there is a problem - the fact that you can't give them well defined rules: "cats have 4 legs and 1 tail", "people most commonly have two eyes with matching eye colour" or "cars are symmetrical". Until there's a solution to that, I doubt we'll see a machine writing good code. But to be fair, I'd be incredibly excited to see one - that opens up so many doors - we could start finding cures for incurable deseases and cures for deseases we know very little about, accelerate every aspect of our lives - space exploration, climate change, aging, transportation and so on. If anything, seeing a model that writes code a thousand times better than I ever would, will not discourage me from writing code. Far from it, I would do anything I'm physically and mentally capable of to be a part of it. As for when it's commonplace - yes and no. It's like knowing 60 digits of pi - it works as a party trick but other than that I don't see any real value. But again - I think we are really far away from that and I consider those thoughts to be my personal speculations at best. Only time will tell.
- karmakaze 7y ago
  Machines don't need these rules. Cars don't need to be symmetrical any more than an antenna or other structure[0]. This is exactly analogous to how AlphaGo/AlphaZero played strange bad-looking moves. [0] https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-alien-look-of-deep-learning-generative-design-5c5f871f7d10 https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-alien-look-of-deep-l...

drdeca 7y ago

I feel like “still basically curve fitting” may be underselling emotion-wise how powerful “curve fitting” is. Is there any computational task which couldn’t be done through something which could be called “curve fitting”? “Curve fitting” just means “approximating a function”, yeah? And what is a computational task other than computing a function, or some generalization of functions (e.g. could involve randomness or interactivity or the like as well) Now, yes, current AI doesn’t yet have a model of the world including it being embedded in the world, and such that it chooses actions in order to further goals. But, I don’t see why such a thing fundamentally couldn’t be accomplished using what one might call “curve fitting”. If Strong AI could potentially be accomplished using “curve fitting”, I’m not sure that it makes sense to say things like “merely curve fitting”. Though, you didn’t say “just” or “merely”.