Someone somewhere asked why a lot of people in the Go community is taking this in a somewhat hard way, here is my hypothesis:
Go, unlike Chess, has deep mytho attached to it. Throughout the history of many Asian countries it's seen as the ultimate abstract strategy game that deeply relies on players' intuition, personality, worldview. The best players are not described as "smart", they are described as "wise". I think there is even an ancient story about an entire diplomatic exchange being brokered over a single Go game.
Throughout history, Go has become more than just a board game, it has become a medium where the sagacious ones use to reflect their world views, discuss their philosophy, and communicate their beliefs.
So instead of a logic game, it's almost seen and treated as an art form. And now an AI without emotion, philosophy or personality just comes in and brushes all of that aside and turns Go into a simple game of mathematics. It's a little hard to accept for some people.
Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be.
Actually this AI kind of confirms these myths, since its basis are not in mathematics but in neural networks. While it could be argued to be just math, so is the brain, but that's besides the point. The point is, even the programmers have no idea what the AI is thinking.
The way it picks moves is very similar to how top professionals do.
Intuition is reduced to memories stored vaguely as neural connections.
I fear this is an overly mystical misinterpretation of neural nets. (Standard feed-forward) neural nets are layers of non-linear feature transformations. They take inputs and at each step transform those inputs into a more compact representation, distilling the inputs into their most important factors (and throwing away unimportant factors).
So the most likely explanation is that policy/value nets in AlphaGo have learned to extract - with cold logic - the key factors that make up what humans believe to be "good" board positions.
It has little to do with voodoo about neural connections and magic emerging from the weights. AlphaGo has most likely managed to identify the important factors of good board positions (by seeing tons of examples of good and bad moves/positions). It only appears to be magical because these factors are most likely very complex and inter-dependent.
This is supported by the AlphaGo paper - they report that AlphaGo without tree search is about as good as the best tree search programs (amateur pro level). So AlphaGo has taken amateur-pro-level board analysis ability, and combined it with tree search, to achieve top-player performance..
> So AlphaGo has taken amateur-pro-level board analysis ability, and combined it with tree search
I don't think that's an entirely accurate way of putting it, because a player who reaches that level is also doing a little tree searching. Maybe if you found some human who managed to reach "amateur pro" level by playing purely on snap, instinctual decisions without any logic or exploration of variants at all, yes, then you could say their ability to evaluate positions is as good as AlphaGo's.
But I would guess that you are right anyway that we can deduce that its ability to evaluate a board position really is below that of better professionals, and its huge strength is due to the tree search (which of course involves a second "policy" net to pick moves to explore).
In go, the tree searching is named "reading". Even beginners need to read very deep trees (more than 7 moves) to anticipate the result of a Semeai (capturing race).
> distilling the inputs into their most important factors (and throwing away unimportant factors).
Isn't that pretty much the definition of intuition? Combining a bunch of things in some unknown and nonlinear way to result in a 'feeling' about the situation?
Pretty much. The nature of evaluating a Go position, is that it has some notions of similarity like islands, "aliveness", and local features that can be looked at liberty-wise. But in order to fully understand how it all pieces together, one must have seen other positions to intuit the kind of future playstyle that will result in the game. Anyhow, it's perfect for a stochaistic system that just recognizes patterns. As long as you can provide the tree search (ie. the partial position evaluation) you can basically just let it rip.
You can still beat Go using "simpler" math. If you have enough compute power, you can always just minimax the whole game tree. Neural networks aren't un-mathematical; they're just a slightly more complicated technique for discovering an approximation to a function that does what you want (even if you're not sure what that function looks like internally).
So AlphaGo's reign will last only until QuantumGo arrives on the scene? It would be sort of ironic to have spent decades developing practical AIs with classical computing to have them swept aside only when they started to really deliver results...
I mean it's not clear in anyway "where" is the intuition, it just sort of magically emerges from the connections and the weights in a way that no one can really grasp. If nothing else, just due to the sheer number of neurones.
Is this just something you're imagining, or did Google's developers explicitly say, "AlphaGo is beyond our understanding. We have absolutely no idea how it makes its decisions"?
AlphaGo developers don't understand how it works in the same way you wouldn't understand how the program you've written to find prime numbers actually found a big prime number. The sequence of operations is known, but numbers are too big to be comprehended.
Which kind of makes me think. Would machine learning succeed even mildly at recognizing primes? Would we be able to decode the final weights after weeks of learning, and find a sieve program encoded as data?
I suppose in the era of Bobby Fischer, chess was proxy for superpower one-upmanship. That's long gone, but Chess as a game is still doing fine and I expect that it will be the same for Go.
We still have chess tournaments, super-star grandmasters and circus freaks (people who can play blindfolded against multiple opponents). And, yes, computers can easily smoke all but elite players.
In chess the top engines are rated hundreds of ELO points above Magnus Carlsen (top human). No top ranked human vs computer match has been publicised in over 5 years because humans are thoroughly trounced. There are cyborg matches which are interesting. Human + Computer vs Human + Computer because gameplay techniques are considered different. Humans still depend more on higher level goal strategy and less on ruthless positional efficiency (which is probably why they get beat midgame).
What is mind boggling is that 6 months ago no go engine was scratching the surface of professional level go. It took the engines getting a 4-5 stone handicap to be competitive at the lowest level of professional levels.
It looks like this one algorithm has blown through the professional ranks in about 3 months. And a 5-0 victory here would be like 2006 vs 1996 (or even 1993) chess in 3 months.
I guess it's because Go isn't that well known in the West but I find it a bit surprising (though not really) that this isn't getting more press. When Kasparov lost it was news but not really surprising. If it wasn't Kasparov that a computer beat, it would have been the next champion. The writing was on the wall for a long time. It was just a question of when exactly.
As for Go, I guess I would never had made a long bet against computers. But as recently as just over a decade ago, computers lost to merely competent players and people working on Go programs were pretty much saying that they didn't even know what the path forward looked like. Things improved a lot with Monte Carlo but even that stalled out. Admittedly, I don't follow this area closely, but these wins pretty much came out of nowhere.
Go may not be well known in the west, but it was extremely well known in AI circles. Even before DeepBlue, Go was considered the holy grail of competitive game AI.
Oh, I'm well-aware of that and obviously this is big news on sites like this one. I was mostly remarking that this is pretty low on general news radar screens.
I see. What one means by "computer" is always a moving target. Deep Blue was a specially prepared supercomputer from 20 years ago. Apparently, today's top chess software running on a half-decent off-the-shelf machine could crush Deep Blue.
I played Chess as a kid. I watched the local tournament shrink from the big town hall, to the side room in the same building, to a local school hall, to a classroom in that school. I really do think the game is dying - perhaps something that was happening already, but Kasparov losing to Deep Blue seemed to really catalyse it.
(Not saying this is a bad thing. Evolution in games is natural, and I think it's amazing how much innovation is going on right now (particularly enabled by Kickstarter) - you'd think that board game design would have been worked out decades or centuries ago, but in the same way that incandescent bulb development accelerated massively when competition arrived, it feels like game design has got so much better when forced to compete with computer games. If there are other activities that people find more fun than Chess, that's all to the good)
I don't believe there is a relation between the improvement of computer chess and the reduction in the availability of in-person chess.
I also played chess as a kid and the allure of both local and national tournaments was that you could play with a multitude of different players, as opposed to the same 4 or 5 habitual chess players in your family/school/circle of friends.
But now, with the internet, at any second you can play with different people from all over the world, different strengths, styles and whatnot.
Hence now, instead of looking for the local chess club in the weekends we can play, any time of the day, any day of the week, anywhere.
Sites like the excellent lichess [1] are even free (in this case, free both as in beer but also as in speech) and, at any moment there there are 9 thousand, 10 thousand players enjoying this magnificent game.
Because it is far more complex.
But apparently self learning KI has advanced enough.
And yes, chess has lost some reputation. And I guess it will be similar with go. I mean there is a University just for go.
But learning something where you know you can become the best, is something different, than learning something knowing computers will be allways better than you ... so I guess they are having a hard time right now ..
Yeah, can confirm. I am not a Go player, and didn't know much about it. But top Go players are really well respected as some of the highest talents in the society, almost like being feared. It is smart people's game, eventually.
And the fact, that, prior to the deep learning revolution, Go is the only board game that human cannot be beaten, add even more myth and charm to the game and players alike.
Now, it comes to the time, that Go can be modeled by computers, and hundred years of human study is topped by computer in less than a year's time. All those myths around it will be gone. That is the biggest bummer I guess.
How well would the computer fare with a slightly different game -- something like go, but with differing rules? Would a smart human learn faster (in real time, or alternatively with comparable energy use) than an artificial reinforced deep learning system?
And who can make the most interesting new go-like game?
Perhaps this could be tested with chess or checkers, even.
On a more realistic side note... Professional Go players devote decades in training ever since their youth, giving up normal educations and lots of other more lucrative opportunities for their lives. It's very easy to imagine their frustrations now that their life-time devotion actually means nothing in front of the AI.
It's an upright denial to the way of life they so chose and devoted.
IMHO Google should donate the prize towards Go education and Go organizations instead of some random charities.
Isn't this a good thing? Why are high IQ people devoting their entire lives to a game? Maybe this will make them shift their priorities to solving problems that only really smart humans (like them) can solve.
At the root of it, they earn a living by being entertainment. This can be applied to any of the arts or sports. Why are smart people making movies, writing fiction, making music? I think these are the sorts of things that make life worth living.
Abstract strategy games require highly domain specific skills. These skills do not transfer to other endeavors. The world champion Go player might just end up as, had he not played Go, a mid-level lawyer or manager. Who knows. Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=nCMWxjkTAvEC&pg=PA130&lpg=...
Didn't happen in Chess, won't happen in Go. Entertaining a few million people is too lucrative. Everyone wants to cheer for their country in an international competition, so it's always going to have large prize pools.
Uh, talent for Go doesn't translate automatically into talent for math, physics, finance or other branches of science. Even if they are, being the top Go player is probably more attractive than being a meh quant or programmer.
This could equally apply to the bankers -- and the software engineers who enable them -- who crashed the economy in 2008. Go and chess players have contributed much more to the world than these psychopaths.
Perhaps Go playing is on it's way to being one of the first white collar jobs to be lost to AI.
I don't think people will pay to watch Go Bots square off, but I think this example of "obsolete education" is a great reminder that it's not just the assembly line jobs on the chopping block.
Google, should they win, is donating their money to Go charities, STEM education and UNICEF.
So they're doing what you want them to (I can't find a summary of how they're allocating the money across each category). Personally I think the work UNICEF is doing to help women in developing countries is more important than Go charities, but I guess their choices should satisfy everyone.
I wouldn't worry about a quick shift like that. You can look to the Chess world, there are still plenty of masters and grandmasters earning their bread. There's still lots of interest in the human vs. human aspect of the game. In lectures, some GMs make good use of those widely available AIs for analysis, too.
I follow neither Go nor martial arts, but there seem to be some interesting parallels here with some emotional reactions to what appears to be the relative weakness of karate or kung fu versus grappling in UFC. The mystical aura of these martial arts as traditionally practised for hundreds of years suddenly falls away in the face of what often seems like brute force.
In fairness, UFC fairly severely limits what can be done. To begin with, they use gloves, and things like eye gouges and finger locks are illegal.
Because strategies like "ripping out someone's intestines" are illegal, boxing and wrestling have an unfair advantage because they don't have to worry about that stuff to begin with. For more realistic fighting situations, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lei_tai
The eyes are small targets. The only time you can reliably gouge them is when you're already winning a grapple, at which point it's superfluous. Finger locks are similar, with the additional disadvantage of being less likely to end the fight even if successfully applied. Admittedly, UFC rules now also take entertainment into consideration, but early UFC rules mostly just banned things that risked permanent injury for very little tactical benefit.
it was high time that these ancient martial arts were shaken from their comfortable reverie. what were once based on actual fights centuries ago had devolved into pedantic adherence to ritual and form. it actually started way before the UFC: bruce lee shook the kung fu establishment with jeet kune do in the 1960s. helio and carlos gracie shook up jiujitsu by incorporating real world situations. you are actually now seeing wing chun make a comeback. look at conor mcgregor's unorthodox style and you will see phenomenal angles that come from kung fu and tae kwon do (karate), spinning leg kicks that are actually landing, switch stances, etc.
i believe all these ancient arts are making a big comeback. the roots are still there, they just got concealed over the centures.
To me the book was always about Go taken to the extreme. The Game is the Empire and visa-versa. Imagine if Japan had been more dominate in previous war, then conquered space - then you had the Player of Games.
Art is, mostly, domain of knowledge not yet claimed by science. When a technique turns art into science, it means that humans are ready to tackle even harder problems. Think about medicine before and after microscopes. Holy art turned into boring science: huge win for human race.
If an AI won the next Hugo award, I would be rejoiced. It wouldn't mean the end of literature at all; it would mean that humans are ready to produce an even higher form of literature.
We have all kinds of visual art made by computers and AI - prom painting from photos to abstract art to 3D renders.
We have computers writing poems and haiku.
The only thing that's missing is the conceptual creation, which, let's be honest, most human artists struggle at as well. So writing and interesting story is not yet in the AI's domain.
Art is more personal though. There is no single path to "winning" in art, and "good art" tends to mean different things to different people.
I'm sure soon (if not now) AI can easily create art that regurgitates popular trends in the past, and perhaps some artists may find a way to use AI / other algorithmic techniques in a way that complements their personal vision. But AI is a long way off from replicating the quirks of human nature, the unique personalities and personal visions of humans. Until that happens, I can't see terribly interesting art emerging from AI alone.
None of this stuff is that good yet. I see no fundamental limit, but let's not pretend that machine-generated music or poetry is as good as the best human stuff, yet.
I disagree. Art is mostly not a "problem" to be "solved" by science. Art is not graded in a scale of difficulty, from "easy" to "harder" art that mankind has to gradually reach.
Literature is not a lower form of art that we must strive to automate so that we can dedicate ourselves to more "complex" forms.
Maybe. That's definitely not how I read it. Example:
> If an AI won the next Hugo award, I would be rejoiced. It wouldn't mean the end of literature at all; it would mean that humans are ready to produce an even higher form of literature.
To me this seems to be claiming that what we have now is a form of "lower" literature, to be tackled by AI so that humans can produce "an even higher form of literature". But, of course, literature isn't graded in a scale of "low" to "high". (Well, there is lowbrow and highbrow, but that's something else).
The mention of medicine as "holy art turned into boring science" (already somewhat dubious) also seems to point to the idea that it is art that's being "solved". But I admit I might have misread it.
By the way, I don't rule out that art can be produced by an AI (whatever that means). I subscribe to the notion that art is in the eye of the beholder, so if humans can find meaning in something produced by a non-human, that's probably valid art!
> To me this seems to be claiming that what we have now is a form of "lower" literature, to be tackled by AI so that humans can produce "an even higher form of literature". But, of course, literature isn't graded in a scale of "low" to "high". (Well, there is lowbrow and highbrow, but that's something else).
Being "low" or "high" is all dynamic. We already have a good example: the advertisement industry. When a way of advertising your product first came out, it is fresh and captures people eyes. As more and more advertisers follow suit, it became bad ad, and advertisers are forced to find new ways to attract people. Basically the criteria for good ads changes all the time, but that doesn't kill the ads industry.
Now imagine if AIs can write sci-fis that are "good" according to today's criteria. That would mean there will be loads of "good" sci-fis in the market, and people soon get tired of it. Now sci-fi authors have to come up with more creative ways of writing good sci-fis.
So AIs being able to produce literature means more variations and faster iteration in literature style, much like the ads industry today. I don't know whether this is a good or bad thing, but it is certainly far away from the death of literature.
In general, I don't have a problem with your opinion for all human endeavors. I readily accept that many of them can be optimized and automated, indeed freeing humankind to pursue worthier goals.
I'm specifically objecting to your notion of art.
The advertisement industry is not a good analogy. It can indeed be improved, possibly by automated means. In contrast, the progression from "good" to "better" art doesn't work like that -- if it even exists at all! What is your measure of quality, anyway? Complexity? But sometimes minimalism is preferred in art. Maybe how many people like it? It doesn't work either; a lot of people like stuff that is not enjoyed by the majority.
When is art "better"? How can it be "improved"?
PS: the Sci-Fi market is already flooded by below-average human writers, so we don't need an AI to picture this nightmare scenario of good SF writers struggling to sell their books :P
I could see an AI with huge access to data and a database of existing publications finding potential correlations in disparate datasets, generating hypothesis and the experiments required to test them, and forming conclusions based on the results of those experiments. At least Go/Chess/Sports/Art have value in both the action and observation of the act, but when human-driven research can't keep up with AI-driven research, scientist might need to rethink how to explore new forms of science.
> Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be.
I've been thinking precisely about that. I think a book written by a machine will make the NYT bestseller list within our lifetimes (I would give it a 75% chance within 10 years, but that's just a gut feeling).
But aren't the winners of literary awards sort of subjective? I mean, chess and Go are based on beating a direct opponent based on a set of known rules. But getting an award for the best book that is picked by a judge means that you have to hit all the right notes in all the right places for that specific judge or panel. I'm not saying it won't happen, just that it's more subjective
Literary awards are definitely subjective, but I don't think that matters. I'm just saying I think an AI will write a book that a significant portion of the population thinks is very good. The first "good" AI book will likely be from some formulaic genre (think 50 Shades of Gray) that most people think is trash, but enough people will like it to legitimately propel it to the top of the sales charts.
I also think my kids will live long enough to see an animated movie that is conceived of, written, scored, and animated by an AI.
Music is a much easier problem (tight structure, lots of existing data to quickly analyze), and the animation bit is already being pretty thoroughly explored by procedural generation in games. You'd still need a "director" to pick shots, but most of the other pieces are nearly in place. We have algorithms that can create new environments, and design and animate new characters.
But generating a coherent narrative, and good writing to "implement" that narrative. These are huge problems which - as far as I'm aware - would require major breakthroughs to achieve. Machine translation is still utter garbage, and that's fairly straightforward work. We're nowhere near an AI which actually understands language.
the first AI to replicate the success of: an oscar-winning movie; a pulitzer prize novel; a tony award winning musical-- will all at once devalue the IP value of all creative content worldwide by a measurable degree. it will be like watching a global stock market crash in terms of valuation. but, as in chess, and as in go, humans will probably learn from this AI and emulate it as well.
I'm not sure what will happen. Creative works aren't generally fungible. If I order tickets to go see Jack White play, I'm not going to be tempted by Nickelback tickets that are half the price.
It's the same fungibility argument though. The market for sheet music for Willie Nelson's catalog isn't affected by the availability of other music, is it? If I want to play On the Road Again, there's only one IP owner for that.
Depends if you want _that_ music that you remember, or are looking for _some_ music that you'll like though. Once you're going into it with no prior values, price popularity and expectation of interest will dominate your choices, at which point computer generated options will be totally viable.
Imagine the best book you've ever read. Entrancing, enlightening, cathartic. You reach the end, and it's ... perfect. Oh hey, a sequel. Wow, the sequel is just as good as the first book. It expands upon it without diminishing the original -- you feel better, more complete for having read it. Wait, is that a third book in the series? Wow, it's even better than the first two! A fourth -- well, maybe you should go to work now, it's Monday, but the book is so good. Calling in sick once won't hurt anything.
Imagine a perfect series of books, published without end, each better than the last, a new one coming out weekly ... daily ... hourly ...
What you describe is a push situation: the books come out and you have to try to keep up to speed with their release. It could however, also be a pull: whenever you feel like reading an amazing book, you just ask the AI to generate one for you, optionally continuing the last story you read.
Not one, but the best book that you need to read in this particular moment. Full with all the advice that you were seeking, with the right amount of new things that you learn and familiar knowledge that you reinforce. The protagonist casually comments things very related to the open issues in your work, and helps you see the particular issue you're having with your boss from another perspective. With just the right amount of common content so you can comment with your peers at work (perhaps your office pal is reading the story of a side-character in your book - the watercooler conversation is great, he gives you new insights for the reading of this evening - and now you both agree on the discussion thread of last week).
Hey, what's that? It seems that the new upgrade is now able to create scenes in Unity with the scenarios that are covered by your next novel. Great! Also there's this interactive package where your work items can be not only an input but also an output and turns your work into a game. By the way your girlfriend has entered your book, let's switch to some of the shared scenes... let's put on our VR glasses... good. Now I only need someone to feed and clean me.
You could also potentially specify constraints on a book and have it generated for you, e.g. generate me a book about a gay dutch vampire in the 1800s. Could open up a whole new concept of hyper speciaised books tailored for individuals particular desires and preferences.
The practical problem with this is that, as I understand it, the deep learning system needs a pretty large data set to work with to infer rules from. You can do this with go because there is a constraint on legal moves and a deterministic win condition, but given how vast the number of potential novels is (If we count the space of all ten thousand word collections of grammatically acceptable sentences) the existing number of novels may no be enough to infer a pattern. (Though possibly you could split the problem up by separately doing the natural language processing and abstractin out the plot)
Ignoring the training problem, apply it to movies: I'd like to see this movie, but starring these actors, directed by this director, with a soundtrack by this composer/band.
This is only a bad thing if you feel compelled or addicted to reading these books. There is nothing wrong with always having a better book ready until you obsess about it.
> And now an AI without emotion, philosophy or personality just comes in and brushes all of that aside and turns Go into a simple game of mathematics
Well, I am of the opinion that mathematics is the language that subsumes all other kinds of languages and line of thoughts. In the end we shall be able to describe every idea or thought in purely mathematical form.
I believe that mathematics is just a tall model of implications built from atoms and relations. To say that math underlies everything is to say that we can model things. To say that math is not in something is to say that no set of atoms and relations can account for that something's behavior at a rate better than chance.
Even though we do not have a complete understanding of exactly how the networks work, what is the function that they are minimizing but what we do know is that it is a mathematical function i.e. it has been mathematically modeled. So, I think it is safe to say that it does turn it into a game of mathematics.
Yes the function themselves are pure mathematical functions, but the way to derive them relies on human intuition (not mathematical formula). It's like saying: I know how to do a 1 times 3, I just do 1 + 1 + 1, but I can't tell you why, then I can't say that 1 times 3 is just mathematics.
"As a casual player of Go myself, some of the moves that AlphaGo made were crazy. Even one of the 9th Dan analysts said something along the lines of 'That move has never been made in the history of Go, and its brillant.' and 'Professional Go players will be learning and copying that move as a part of the Go canon now'."
Yeah, I've been noticing the pronouns thing. In chess challenges I always got the impression that the AI's play style was like a chain chomp. Limited, but ruthless within its limits, and definitely 'mechanical'. In these games the commentators are treating AlphaGo like a person.
If people didn't know AlphaGo was a machine, and simply played anonymously online against masters, I wonder how they would interpret AlphaGo's personality?
"Go, unlike Chess, has deep mytho attached to it."
While I'm not able to comment on the length/depth of history of chess vs. go, the above statement seems foolish. Chess also has a lot of mythology and mystique attached to it. Champion chess players (perhaps more so a decade or two or three ago) are also treated with a respect that is not casual.
I liken Go to a real-time strategy game. Essentially a game of StarCraft 2 can have an infinite set of 'moves'. When an player wins at StarCraft 2, you can argue that he is wise too.
Yuioup said that the winning player can be called wise, not the game it self. I doubt there are any three millenia old Go players around, but I can be wrong.
> Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be.
Considering some of the recent Hugo winners, it turns out the story doesn't actually have to be good, so yeah, a computer-written story winning is probably closer than we think.
Go, unlike Chess, has deep mytho attached to it. Throughout the history of many Asian countries it's seen as the ultimate abstract strategy game that deeply relies on players' intuition, personality, worldview. The best players are not described as "smart", they are described as "wise". I think there is even an ancient story about an entire diplomatic exchange being brokered over a single Go game.
Throughout history, Go has become more than just a board game, it has become a medium where the sagacious ones use to reflect their world views, discuss their philosophy, and communicate their beliefs.
So instead of a logic game, it's almost seen and treated as an art form. And now an AI without emotion, philosophy or personality just comes in and brushes all of that aside and turns Go into a simple game of mathematics. It's a little hard to accept for some people.
Now imagine the winning author of the next Hugo Award turns out to be an AI, how unsettling would that be.