10 ms·

I sympathize. It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursui

I sympathize. It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ... But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ... To top it off — there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play ... I imagine that attempting to analyze alpha go’s victories would produce an unending sequence of the feeling of never gaining any new insight “into go”. The analysis of go is now about optimizing algorithms — which _is_ interesting — but I don’t think it’s interesting for the same reasons that someone might’ve been passionate about go in the past ...

bhouston 7y ago
And this will happen to all of humanness in time. Everything we think is unique about us, and our endeavours, will be reduced to optimization and learning algorithms eventually. The main issue in determining man or machine in each situation eventually will be which has the lower TOC.
- needToCrust 7y ago
  Hmm, I don’t think an ai could use optimization and learning algorithms to “learn” to DM D&D. For that, the ai would have to simply be an i.
  - bhouston 7y ago
    Eventually it can do your example of unique human intelligence whatever that example is.
    - pepve 7y ago
      Another example of unique human intelligence: drown in existential dread. I can do that, you can do that, but will a computer be able to do it?
      - smallnamespace 7y ago
        I mean, you joke, but existential dread might be an adaptive response to a hostile environment. ...a situation we might want to simulate for training purposes
      - asib 7y ago
        I've written this in another comment but I'll repeat here. What you're asking really boils down to a combination of whether a human brain can be simulated and whether human intelligence is merely due to the physical brain (or do you believe in the existence of some intangible consciousness that cannot be replicated by a machine). Assume you believe both to be true, then your simulated brain is surely able to drown in existential dread because it's capable of no more and no less than the human one.
    - needToCrust 7y ago
      Ai won’t, but a machine with true intelligence will. That was the point of talking about ai needing to be i.
      - Zaak 7y ago
        So you're defining "AI" to be anything that we can currently program a computer to do, and "I" to be anything we can't yet? That doesn't seem like a useful distinction to me. Unless you're using "I" to mean general (artificial) intelligence, in which case you should probably use the more well-known term.
        needToCrust 7y ago
        No, please don’t straw man my point. I’ll assume you know what ai is and that you understand there is a huge difference between that and human intelligence. I am arguing that ai will never be able to DM a D&D game. For that, a computer will need human intelligence.
        UnbugMe 7y ago
        But AI definition is still target-in-motion, very blurred.
        needToCrust 7y ago
        Why the but? I didn’t say anything that disagrees with that statement.
        UnbugMe 7y ago
        I feel like it's far too blurry to make claims such as "will never be able to DM a D&D game".
- roomey 7y ago
  Except Calvinball of course
- macinjosh 7y ago
  Perhaps the one 'special thing' piece humanness is that we can and tend to automate ourselves. (i.e. we're lazy) :)
- pepve 7y ago
  Re: "all of humanness" https://xkcd.com/1875/ https://xkcd.com/1875/ (If you don't want to click the link, there's a joke there that machines may have a hard time "being to cool to care about stuff.")
- hos234 7y ago
  That depends on whether "Everything" is finite or infinite.
- eigenhombre 7y ago
  While it may be true, this is, of course, conjecture. Certainly many skills that seemed "uniquely human" have turned out not to be. That does not mean that all such abilities will be amenable to replacement by, as you say, "optimization and learning algorithms." Machine authoring of great art, a problem which may be at least as hard to solve as Artificial General Intelligence, does not seem to be on the horizon any time soon, for example.
- filleokus 7y ago
  In the same way as the Go master (perhaps) feels disillusioned by being beaten by the AI, I think people in general will not accept humans being replaced with machines in some "special fields". In those fields, the customer/user, will not experience the same utility if a robot is doing the service compared to another human, even if they are indistinguishable. I think an interesting issue here is that in the (far) future, many services could be performed cheaper by AI/robots and in such a way that the customer is unable to tell wether a human is involved or not. And in this future, humans will probably be a premium service. Take motor sports for example. We can probably now/soon replace F1 drivers with algorithms and cameras, but nobody would pay 1000's of USD to watch them drive around in Monaco. If it would turn out someday that the drivers had been replaced (for safety reasons or whatever) without telling the fans, the outcry would be tremendous. And even if outcry does not always equal "true utility", I think it highlights my point: humans made of flesh and blood risking their lives or performing extraordinary feats have an intrinsic economic value that can't be replaced.
  - currymj 7y ago
    as early as the 90s, automated control systems in F1 resulted in cars (i.e. Williams FW14) that to some extent drove themselves better than any human. indeed, many of the systems used have been specifically banned since then.
mlurp 7y ago
Is this true? From what I've read about Alpha Zero/etc, in both Go and chess, it's going interesting move sequences that people hadn't considered viable before. That certainly seems like an interesting thing to learn. Also, sure, you can dismiss it all as statistics. But how sure are you that what's happening with humans isn't in some form? I'd also say that MCTS is something people kind of do too in games: look a few moves deep and try to judge the value of that position, which is definitely more interesting than simple RL/bookkeeping/stats.
- Madmallard 7y ago
  The sequences are viable because alpha go assessed state much deeper than humans do. Doesn't mean humans will be able to utilize them correctly.
  - tfha 7y ago
    Nah at least in chess all the grandmasters lean heavily on the chess engines, including studying top games between the best AI
    - protomikron 7y ago
      > Nah at least in chess all the grandmasters lean heavily on the chess engines, including studying top games between the best AI They may use it for training and analysis, but they don't play their style - they play an inferior style (not to dismiss their achievements).
      - dfan 7y ago
        I am not sure what you mean by "style", but top chess grandmasters certainly play in a different way today compared to, say, 20 years ago. Current play is much more concrete (less based on general strategic principles) and players are willing to take greater risks for rewards such as material gains, since AIs have shown that there are often many more defensive resources than was previously thought as long as the defender remains tenacious.
kazinator 7y ago
> perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ... But, while you sit there waxing creative, your brain cells are likewise performing a mindless task on an enormous scale.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Jach 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpN3-2FP-kIxXhhdDds9ey55HRCLyw_J https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpN3-2FP-kIxXhhdDds9... That's a playlist of 31 self-play games analyzed by Michael Redmond 9p. They are plenty interesting to study.
kvark 7y ago
> the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go There is art! It's just an emergent property of learning the game. Seeking art doesn't make you a better player - that's the trap one can easily fall in any sports. It's the opposite - efficient strategies solidify as art.
debt 7y ago
whats being lost here I think idk is the fact that the robot lost once because lee de-dol exploited a bug in alpha go. lee seems to play it down as “just a bug” but it seems like that might be a pretty good strategy.
jv22222 7y ago
I’m now curios, can a human design a game that a computer can not beat a human at.
- salomaki 7y ago
  The Turing Test game? (For now at least)
- asib 7y ago
  This reduces down to the question of whether it's possible to simulate a brain (or an equivalent formulation, such as is consciousness somehow extraphysical). I believe I'm right in saying current consensus says that this is possible.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Theoretically possible, but so far nobody has done it, or knows how to...
- andrepd 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1002/ https://xkcd.com/1002/
  - arunix 7y ago
    This hasn't been true since 2015, when the software became decisively stronger than human players. https://www.kingpinchess.net/2015/07/arimaa-game-over/ https://www.kingpinchess.net/2015/07/arimaa-game-over/
    - osyed1 7y ago
      Actually humans are now able to defeat the bot that won the Arimaa challenge. In games like this: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628806&s=w http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628806&s=w However, there is also a new bot that has been trained using the self play method and has been crushing the bot that won the Arimaa challenge. In games like this: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628534&s=b http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628534&s=b Most likely the bots are still ahead.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ... This is a rationalist opinion that is attractive because it appears unbiased, unwilling to make any concessions to human nature and to recognise its limitations. And yet- this same opinion overlooks the greatest source of scientific wonderment in the victories of AlphaGo and family against the best human players. Which is to say: that human players play Go (and Chess, and Poker, and Magic: the Gathering etc) very differently than machines. In particular, human players do none of the extremely tedious, extremely computationally intensive maths that computer players have to do. Human players don't perform MCTS, neither do they train by self-play for many thousands of human-years. Somehow, humans can play Go and Chess and all manner of board games _without_ having to do any of the hard work that only computers can do reliably. We are not particularly good at those games- but we can play them well enough that beating the best of us still takes huge amounts of computational power. How we do this, why we are even capable of doing this and what other benefits it confers to us: _that_ is the interesting set of questions. That a big machine can outperform a human ... we have known this since ancient times. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
- mr_toad 7y ago
  > In particular, human players do none of the extremely tedious, extremely computationally intensive maths that computer players have to do. This sounds like a Chinese room argument. Performing computationally expensive maths doesn’t make the computer intelligent. But that says nothing about the intelligence of the maths itself.
  - tripzilch 7y ago
    I see how it seems like a Chinese Room argument, but I saw it more as a statement about how much more there is to figure out about how the human mind does things, that we need to build such particularly powerful machines to defeat it.
braythwayt 7y ago
> It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ... All but the last phrase are still true. Pursuit of Go for beauty is still pursuit of Go for beauty. I will never play any instrument as well as a sequencer. I believe algorithms will make beautiful Jazz improvisations in real time, in my lifetime. But playing is still beautiful. I will never run as fast as a horse, much less a bicycle or car. In my lifetime cars will drive themselves more safely and faster than I can drive a car. It will still be enjoyable. I sincerely hope my children will live better lives and make better choices than I did. My life is still beautiful most days... It is our attachment to being smarter than machines that makes us unhappy. We fear evidence that we’re not that special. But we do not need to be special to be happy. We do not need to be special to find beauty in our pursuits. One day, a bot will live on HN and have hundreds of times more karma than I have. It won’t diminish the beauty of my best contributions. Perhaps the humility of seeing this happen will actually make me a happier person.
- blondie9x 7y ago
  The difference is that this AI agent was built to beat humans. Horses were not built to run faster than humans. You have to remember the specific comparison and the art that humans tried to partake in to master go. Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly. Cars and humans also do not compete at the 100 meter dash. If humans and robots compete at 100 meter dash than the olympics will similarly lose its luster.
  - 55555 7y ago
    > Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly I hate to be that guy, but: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon It is very silly indeed.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
sungchi 7y ago
> there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play That's not true. Q: How much better is AI now compared to when Lee was playing against AlphaGo? "It has increased enormously. It is only natural for the pros to lose a couple of spots. That's why most of the pros study baduk with AI." Korean News Interview: http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=201911270600035&code=940100#csidxcb60de615c3fa5aafbaa5ab57d1e070 http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=2019...
pyrale 7y ago
I don't want to break your ideal, but the description of go you make died decades ago. For a long time now, top go has been about fighting in the chuban, and there is no grand theory about that, only grinding your mind to read more combinations than your opponent. Another correction about what you said is that computer go has brought tremendous evolutions to the pro scene. Josekis that were accepted for centuries have been challenged, and people have learned why. The value of sente has been emphasized, and pro players that have not learned are being pusshed out. In that aspect, computer go has brought change of a magnitude comparable to the shin fuseki movement. Finally, it is expected that the availability of strong programs will bring a wave of better players, much like what happened in chess. I for one look forward to this happening.
- breatheoften 7y ago
  Interesting - I definitely have only a surface understanding of the go community and had not respected that the community embraces the game’s “requirement to grind the combinations”. I had always thought there was some element of recognizing its “impossible to ever even remotely approach a true grinding of the combinations” for go — and that somehow players _did something else_ effectively when they played at a high level. It’s that “doing something else effectively” that the defeat of humanity by go algorithms challenges ... Would be super Interesting if there could ever be a reversal which might allow humanity to beat go algorithms once again ... is there any evidence from the strategies that the go community has learned by analyzing the new go algorithms that this could be possible? Or is there just more and more evidence over time than humans will never be able to compete effectively at go again?
  - pyrale 7y ago
    It is indeed impossible to evaluate every possibility, especially for humans. Still, midgame fighting is all about evaluating as much as possible and to estimate an unfinished position. It is not imaginable now that humans will beat a machine in the future, but it is also undeniable that humans progressed from computer go. The evolution of joseki (game patterns considered fair for both players), especially corner joseki are material evidence of that.
michalu 7y ago
I don't follow AlphaGo but there is a LOT to learn from AlphaZero in chess ... engines are already changing the way chess is played.

bhouston 7y ago

And this will happen to all of humanness in time. Everything we think is unique about us, and our endeavours, will be reduced to optimization and learning algorithms eventually. The main issue in determining man or machine in each situation eventually will be which has the lower TOC.

needToCrust 7y ago
Hmm, I don’t think an ai could use optimization and learning algorithms to “learn” to DM D&D. For that, the ai would have to simply be an i.
- bhouston 7y ago
  Eventually it can do your example of unique human intelligence whatever that example is.
  - pepve 7y ago
    Another example of unique human intelligence: drown in existential dread. I can do that, you can do that, but will a computer be able to do it?
    - smallnamespace 7y ago
      I mean, you joke, but existential dread might be an adaptive response to a hostile environment. ...a situation we might want to simulate for training purposes
    - asib 7y ago
      I've written this in another comment but I'll repeat here. What you're asking really boils down to a combination of whether a human brain can be simulated and whether human intelligence is merely due to the physical brain (or do you believe in the existence of some intangible consciousness that cannot be replicated by a machine). Assume you believe both to be true, then your simulated brain is surely able to drown in existential dread because it's capable of no more and no less than the human one.
  - needToCrust 7y ago
    Ai won’t, but a machine with true intelligence will. That was the point of talking about ai needing to be i.
    - Zaak 7y ago
      So you're defining "AI" to be anything that we can currently program a computer to do, and "I" to be anything we can't yet? That doesn't seem like a useful distinction to me. Unless you're using "I" to mean general (artificial) intelligence, in which case you should probably use the more well-known term.
      - needToCrust 7y ago
        No, please don’t straw man my point. I’ll assume you know what ai is and that you understand there is a huge difference between that and human intelligence. I am arguing that ai will never be able to DM a D&D game. For that, a computer will need human intelligence.
        UnbugMe 7y ago
        But AI definition is still target-in-motion, very blurred.
        needToCrust 7y ago
        Why the but? I didn’t say anything that disagrees with that statement.
        UnbugMe 7y ago
        I feel like it's far too blurry to make claims such as "will never be able to DM a D&D game".
roomey 7y ago
Except Calvinball of course
macinjosh 7y ago
Perhaps the one 'special thing' piece humanness is that we can and tend to automate ourselves. (i.e. we're lazy) :)
pepve 7y ago
Re: "all of humanness" https://xkcd.com/1875/ https://xkcd.com/1875/ (If you don't want to click the link, there's a joke there that machines may have a hard time "being to cool to care about stuff.")
hos234 7y ago
That depends on whether "Everything" is finite or infinite.
eigenhombre 7y ago
While it may be true, this is, of course, conjecture. Certainly many skills that seemed "uniquely human" have turned out not to be. That does not mean that all such abilities will be amenable to replacement by, as you say, "optimization and learning algorithms." Machine authoring of great art, a problem which may be at least as hard to solve as Artificial General Intelligence, does not seem to be on the horizon any time soon, for example.
filleokus 7y ago
In the same way as the Go master (perhaps) feels disillusioned by being beaten by the AI, I think people in general will not accept humans being replaced with machines in some "special fields". In those fields, the customer/user, will not experience the same utility if a robot is doing the service compared to another human, even if they are indistinguishable. I think an interesting issue here is that in the (far) future, many services could be performed cheaper by AI/robots and in such a way that the customer is unable to tell wether a human is involved or not. And in this future, humans will probably be a premium service. Take motor sports for example. We can probably now/soon replace F1 drivers with algorithms and cameras, but nobody would pay 1000's of USD to watch them drive around in Monaco. If it would turn out someday that the drivers had been replaced (for safety reasons or whatever) without telling the fans, the outcry would be tremendous. And even if outcry does not always equal "true utility", I think it highlights my point: humans made of flesh and blood risking their lives or performing extraordinary feats have an intrinsic economic value that can't be replaced.
- currymj 7y ago
  as early as the 90s, automated control systems in F1 resulted in cars (i.e. Williams FW14) that to some extent drove themselves better than any human. indeed, many of the systems used have been specifically banned since then.

mlurp 7y ago

Is this true? From what I've read about Alpha Zero/etc, in both Go and chess, it's going interesting move sequences that people hadn't considered viable before. That certainly seems like an interesting thing to learn. Also, sure, you can dismiss it all as statistics. But how sure are you that what's happening with humans isn't in some form? I'd also say that MCTS is something people kind of do too in games: look a few moves deep and try to judge the value of that position, which is definitely more interesting than simple RL/bookkeeping/stats.

Madmallard 7y ago
The sequences are viable because alpha go assessed state much deeper than humans do. Doesn't mean humans will be able to utilize them correctly.
- tfha 7y ago
  Nah at least in chess all the grandmasters lean heavily on the chess engines, including studying top games between the best AI
  - protomikron 7y ago
    > Nah at least in chess all the grandmasters lean heavily on the chess engines, including studying top games between the best AI They may use it for training and analysis, but they don't play their style - they play an inferior style (not to dismiss their achievements).
    - dfan 7y ago
      I am not sure what you mean by "style", but top chess grandmasters certainly play in a different way today compared to, say, 20 years ago. Current play is much more concrete (less based on general strategic principles) and players are willing to take greater risks for rewards such as material gains, since AIs have shown that there are often many more defensive resources than was previously thought as long as the defender remains tenacious.

kazinator 7y ago

> perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ... But, while you sit there waxing creative, your brain cells are likewise performing a mindless task on an enormous scale.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Jach 7y ago

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpN3-2FP-kIxXhhdDds9ey55HRCLyw_J https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqpN3-2FP-kIxXhhdDds9... That's a playlist of 31 self-play games analyzed by Michael Redmond 9p. They are plenty interesting to study.

kvark 7y ago

> the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go There is art! It's just an emergent property of learning the game. Seeking art doesn't make you a better player - that's the trap one can easily fall in any sports. It's the opposite - efficient strategies solidify as art.

debt 7y ago

whats being lost here I think idk is the fact that the robot lost once because lee de-dol exploited a bug in alpha go. lee seems to play it down as “just a bug” but it seems like that might be a pretty good strategy.

jv22222 7y ago

I’m now curios, can a human design a game that a computer can not beat a human at.

salomaki 7y ago
The Turing Test game? (For now at least)
asib 7y ago
This reduces down to the question of whether it's possible to simulate a brain (or an equivalent formulation, such as is consciousness somehow extraphysical). I believe I'm right in saying current consensus says that this is possible.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  Theoretically possible, but so far nobody has done it, or knows how to...
andrepd 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1002/ https://xkcd.com/1002/
- arunix 7y ago
  This hasn't been true since 2015, when the software became decisively stronger than human players. https://www.kingpinchess.net/2015/07/arimaa-game-over/ https://www.kingpinchess.net/2015/07/arimaa-game-over/
  - osyed1 7y ago
    Actually humans are now able to defeat the bot that won the Arimaa challenge. In games like this: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628806&s=w http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628806&s=w However, there is also a new bot that has been trained using the self play method and has been crushing the bot that won the Arimaa challenge. In games like this: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628534&s=b http://arimaa.com/arimaa/games/jsShowGame.cgi?gid=628534&s=b Most likely the bots are still ahead.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ... This is a rationalist opinion that is attractive because it appears unbiased, unwilling to make any concessions to human nature and to recognise its limitations. And yet- this same opinion overlooks the greatest source of scientific wonderment in the victories of AlphaGo and family against the best human players. Which is to say: that human players play Go (and Chess, and Poker, and Magic: the Gathering etc) very differently than machines. In particular, human players do none of the extremely tedious, extremely computationally intensive maths that computer players have to do. Human players don't perform MCTS, neither do they train by self-play for many thousands of human-years. Somehow, humans can play Go and Chess and all manner of board games _without_ having to do any of the hard work that only computers can do reliably. We are not particularly good at those games- but we can play them well enough that beating the best of us still takes huge amounts of computational power. How we do this, why we are even capable of doing this and what other benefits it confers to us: _that_ is the interesting set of questions. That a big machine can outperform a human ... we have known this since ancient times. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. - Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

mr_toad 7y ago
> In particular, human players do none of the extremely tedious, extremely computationally intensive maths that computer players have to do. This sounds like a Chinese room argument. Performing computationally expensive maths doesn’t make the computer intelligent. But that says nothing about the intelligence of the maths itself.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  I see how it seems like a Chinese Room argument, but I saw it more as a statement about how much more there is to figure out about how the human mind does things, that we need to build such particularly powerful machines to defeat it.

braythwayt 7y ago

> It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ... All but the last phrase are still true. Pursuit of Go for beauty is still pursuit of Go for beauty. I will never play any instrument as well as a sequencer. I believe algorithms will make beautiful Jazz improvisations in real time, in my lifetime. But playing is still beautiful. I will never run as fast as a horse, much less a bicycle or car. In my lifetime cars will drive themselves more safely and faster than I can drive a car. It will still be enjoyable. I sincerely hope my children will live better lives and make better choices than I did. My life is still beautiful most days... It is our attachment to being smarter than machines that makes us unhappy. We fear evidence that we’re not that special. But we do not need to be special to be happy. We do not need to be special to find beauty in our pursuits. One day, a bot will live on HN and have hundreds of times more karma than I have. It won’t diminish the beauty of my best contributions. Perhaps the humility of seeing this happen will actually make me a happier person.

blondie9x 7y ago
The difference is that this AI agent was built to beat humans. Horses were not built to run faster than humans. You have to remember the specific comparison and the art that humans tried to partake in to master go. Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly. Cars and humans also do not compete at the 100 meter dash. If humans and robots compete at 100 meter dash than the olympics will similarly lose its luster.
- 55555 7y ago
  > Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly I hate to be that guy, but: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon It is very silly indeed.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

sungchi 7y ago

> there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play That's not true. Q: How much better is AI now compared to when Lee was playing against AlphaGo? "It has increased enormously. It is only natural for the pros to lose a couple of spots. That's why most of the pros study baduk with AI." Korean News Interview: http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=201911270600035&code=940100#csidxcb60de615c3fa5aafbaa5ab57d1e070 http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=2019...

pyrale 7y ago

I don't want to break your ideal, but the description of go you make died decades ago. For a long time now, top go has been about fighting in the chuban, and there is no grand theory about that, only grinding your mind to read more combinations than your opponent. Another correction about what you said is that computer go has brought tremendous evolutions to the pro scene. Josekis that were accepted for centuries have been challenged, and people have learned why. The value of sente has been emphasized, and pro players that have not learned are being pusshed out. In that aspect, computer go has brought change of a magnitude comparable to the shin fuseki movement. Finally, it is expected that the availability of strong programs will bring a wave of better players, much like what happened in chess. I for one look forward to this happening.

breatheoften 7y ago
Interesting - I definitely have only a surface understanding of the go community and had not respected that the community embraces the game’s “requirement to grind the combinations”. I had always thought there was some element of recognizing its “impossible to ever even remotely approach a true grinding of the combinations” for go — and that somehow players _did something else_ effectively when they played at a high level. It’s that “doing something else effectively” that the defeat of humanity by go algorithms challenges ... Would be super Interesting if there could ever be a reversal which might allow humanity to beat go algorithms once again ... is there any evidence from the strategies that the go community has learned by analyzing the new go algorithms that this could be possible? Or is there just more and more evidence over time than humans will never be able to compete effectively at go again?
- pyrale 7y ago
  It is indeed impossible to evaluate every possibility, especially for humans. Still, midgame fighting is all about evaluating as much as possible and to estimate an unfinished position. It is not imaginable now that humans will beat a machine in the future, but it is also undeniable that humans progressed from computer go. The evolution of joseki (game patterns considered fair for both players), especially corner joseki are material evidence of that.

michalu 7y ago

I don't follow AlphaGo but there is a LOT to learn from AlphaZero in chess ... engines are already changing the way chess is played.