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History made: Go program MoGo beats professional player in 9-stone game
- dood 18y agoAs far as I'm aware this is the first time a Go program has been shown to play at or above Dan level at 19x19 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings].
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- Alex3917 18y agoKurzweil was right. Looks like we just might live long enough to live forever after all.
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- Alex3917 18y agoThe really unnerving thing is that they've improved 9 stones in only a year. One of the biggest criticisms of Kurzweil was that the software would never improve fast enough to match the improvement in hardware, but we see here that this program is able to beat dans by using a slightly modified version of guess-and-check.
- dood 18y agoOops, sorry I deleted my comment because I didn't think it added much. For the record, it was something like: "I also suspect Go is related to AGI, so I'm finding the strong advancement a little unnerving (as someone so far skeptical of the likelihood of singularity in our lifetime)"
- gukjoon 18y agoI've always thought that this criticism didn't make sense. Improvements in software are highly dependent on improvements in hardware: http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html What would have once taken incredible software engineering skills is now trivial. Hardware is a big constraint on software development. How can you possibly expect software and hardware development to be neck and neck?
- thaumaturgy 18y agoImprovement in hardware promotes laziness in software development.
- a-priori 18y agoMaybe in the general case (i.e, most software development), but in the special case (i.e, high performance computing, which this falls under), more powerful hardware begets more powerful software.
- gukjoon 18y agoHahahha maybe. But maybe it's a good thing we don't have to churn butter anymore, right? Improvements in technology mean that we don't have to deal with the low level stuff that's been done a million times before, allowing us to focus on high level stuff that nobody's done.
- ericwan 18y agoIt also means we can do more with less. =)
- ajross 18y agoHow much of that is just due to attention? Not being an expert, my assumption would be that we're just seeing the effect of chess software getting boring (no more people to beat) and the supercomputer games folks moving on to greener pastures.
- KirinDave 18y agoNot much. Go is a fundamentally harder game to play than Chess, by several orders of magnitude. Unlike chess, where the next move set is large but fairly constrained, every turn in go can let you move (nearly) anywhere that hasn't already been moved to. What's more, go players frequently make moves that to the uninitiated seem like "running away", which is to say not playing near areas of contention. These are placed in moments of low vulnerability so that eventually the player can build towards them. Seldom do even experienced go players know every move that will lead up to connecting with these distant stones, but they know they lend strength to that area and thats a place where they see potential for future moves. As such, traditional AI game techniques really haven't scaled well to Go. It's only recently that we've began to use huge sums of hardware just to make it play go at a level that most would consider to be an experienced amateur. It seems like Go is a more recognition-based problem, so we'll have to see if Jeff Hawkin's work might show some progress there once they get their work off the ground.
- lacker 18y agoIt's more that the MoGo folks have finally developed an algorithm which is appropriate to Go. Their monte-carlo-based strategies scale well in Go, whereas the alpha-beta-style chess-like algorithms do not scale well. I don't think there are any people involved who used to work on chess who now work on Go.
- hugh 18y agoIt's nice that they've improved by nine stones in a year, but what I don't buy is the idea that this means they're going to get up to winning an unhandicapped game against a 9th dan player anytime soon. As I understand it the game is currently playing like a very good amateur player. If the experience with chess is anything to go by, it took an awful lot of work to get from the point of beating most amateurs to the point of beating Kasparov.
- tptacek 18y agoIsn't 9x9 Go substantially easier, computationally, from 19x19?
- sysop073 18y agoYes, but this was a 19x19 game, you can see it on the screen in the background. The "9 stones" is referring to the computer's handicap
- Eliezer 18y agoA 9-stone game means a 9-stone handicap, not a 9x9 board.
- tptacek 18y agoAh, thanks.
- apu 18y agoUseful summary: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6vgrw/historycal_moment_mogo_computer_program_defeated/c04z2tk http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6vgrw/historyca...
- mooneater 18y agoHomepage for the program: http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm
- mooneater 18y agoNice machine learning paper on the program: (PDF) http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/387.pdf http://www.machinelearning.org/proceedings/icml2007/papers/3...
- rbanffy 18y agoThis proves at least one of two things: that computers can be more intelligent than people or that one doesn't need to be intelligent to play Go.