4 ms·
At lot to agree with here: [Deep Blue] cannot answer elementary questions about chess such as “If a bishop is now on a black square, will it ever be on a white
by mhneu 6y ago
At lot to agree with here:
[Deep Blue] cannot answer elementary questions about chess such as “If a bishop is now on a black square, will it ever be on a white square?” ... All that it can do is to generate a next move of extraordinary quality.
But in a deeper sense, the match between Deep Blue and Kasparov proves that Hofstadter
was profoundly right. ... It is precisely this power of abstracting, of
stepping outside the game to a higher-level view, that enabled Kasparov to find where Deep Blue
was weak and to exploit this to win his match.
Also, I strongly agree that the music/Bach connection in the book makes little sense.
The only aspect of the book that really does not work for me is the attempt to integrate music.
And there are some very interesting insights with benefit of 20 years of hindsight.
Today, open-source chess programs are better than the best humans. (they have been "trained" via a form of adversarial learning.)
And:
Part of this, of course, is nostalgia for the halcyon years of AI when the funding agencies had more money to throw around than there were researchers to take it, and the universities had more tenure-track
slots than there were Ph.D’s to fill them;
Biden just announced a desire to DOUBLE American investment in R&D. Such an optimistic time we are at right now.
- karmakaze 6y ago> to a higher-level view, that enabled Kasparov to find where Deep Blue was weak I don't know if the same could be said of AlphaZero.
- Bud 6y agoAs a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am forced to wonder if the author of this review was a high-level musician.
- hobs 6y agoAs a person who is a musical idiot I thought it was a great way to establish the concept of patterns and self reference in something like music. The notion of the self referential cannons was seriously impressive to me and I thought served as a great jumping off point into more esoteric conversations in the book.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThere still aren't Bach-equivalent counterpoint solvers. ML has been pretty disappointing for music. It can make some music-like objects, especially for short phrases, but it hasn't done a convincing job of producing the real thing. Music is hard. It's far harder than most people realise. Winning a game is a relatively easy problem, because you know when you have won. Music is much more nebulous. Grammatical correctness is preparatory to creative intent. Even basic metrics of correctness are rather fuzzy. ML doesn't have any concept of intent, so it tends to flail around in a statistical space - and to sound like it.
- jancsika 6y agoJudgment of music quality also happens to be highly subjective. Suppose an AI created a Bach-like contrapuntal exercise with a lot of cross-relations (i.e., clashing dissonant sounds). Would scholars judge it to be at the level of Bach because of the handling of these numerous cross-relations? Or would they claim it isn't at sophisticated as Bach because having that many cross-relations isn't stylistically accurate? Based on the historiography of musicology I would guess the latter. Even though there's an unfinished extant Bach fugue in C minor where he's essentially role-playing a cross-relation obsessed AI composer. The history of theory is even worse. For example, Schenker created theories based on the mastery that Bach, Beethoven, and others displayed in their compositions. But when a piece by Bach didn't fit his theory, he claimed that Bach actually wrote it incorrectly! I'm afraid AI music research is going to have to put up with the same irrationality of humans as every other subjective endeavor. That is, musicians will kick and scream that AI "isn't doing it right," then when it inevitably becomes embedded as a core part of music making we'll hear all about how music produced with classical algorithms on old protools rigs sounds so much "warmer."
- commandlinefan 6y agoOn the other side of the spectrum, I myself am a relative musical neanderthal, having gone into the book not even knowing what the word "fugue" meant. I was fascinated by the way he related this sort of musical "recursion" back to general mathematical problem solving. When I read OP's dismissal of it, I figured I was just underthinking whether it was a good analogy or not, being the unsophisticate that I am - nice to see that somebody who does have some expertise on the subject weighing in.
- _jal 6y agoAgree. I am not a musician, but have absorbed a lot by having lived with them. Weaving Bach in makes perfect sense.
- pdonis 6y ago> As a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am only an amateur player of Bach, but I felt the same way. However, it probably is worth noting that a major reason why Bach works in this context is the particular nature of his music--or more precisely the particular subsample of his music that GEB refers to. I don't think the music of most other composers, or even some of Bach's less contrapuntal music, would have made sense in this context.
- gameswithgo 6y agoJust a note on chess programs: Until very recently (months) the best chess programs consisted of both neural network based ones, and search based ones similar to deep blue. They would go back and forth for supremacy, and both are way better than any human. Recently, one of the top search based engines (stockfish) added neural networks on top of it, and it got significantly better still. This was a couple months back, maybe the pure neural nets have caught up again!
- bolzano 6y agoNice, do you have a link to any details on this ongoing battle?
- CPLX 6y agoI disagree. I’m a professional-level musician and a fan of GEB and I always felt the music and Bach analogies in the book were elegant and insightful.