Andrej Karpathy had some awesome tweets on this yesterday, you can see the thread in the links, but these two were my favorite:<p>"Yes AlphaGo only won by 0.5, but it was not at all a close game. It's an artifact of its training objective."[0]<p>and:<p>"it prefers to win by 0.5 with 99.9999999% chance instead of 10.0 with 99.99% chance."[1]<p>[0]<a href="https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985</a>
[1]<a href="https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121</a>
The game is available here for anyone interested - <a href="http://events.google.com/alphago2017/" rel="nofollow">http://events.google.com/alphago2017/</a><p>It's a half-point win which doesn't seem like a lot, but AlphaGo is intentionally taking lower-risk paths to lock down the win in exchange for some win margin. If you watch the actual game and some commentary, it really feels like AlphaGo is playing at the next level. Some of its moves are so inhuman and subtle.<p>This is a very exciting time for Go; a lot of traditional wisdom has been shaken up in the last couple of years! I heard a story about a Korean pro study group that was doing nothing but studying AlphaGo's games for new insights for some time. I'm looking forward to seeing the future of play as extremely strong Go AI becomes more widely accessible.
According to Deepmind, this version of Alpha Go (aka Master) is 3 stones stronger than the version that defeated Lee Sedol. Prior to this match it had a 60-0 record against high professional dans (on faster game settings, but still). Right now it would be something like a 13-dan pro, almost impossible to beat.<p>The natural occurrence of a human being capable of defeating a bot like this would be very rare, and would take decades to train. In the case of this bot, you just set up a cluster and deploy the same software, to produce as many instances of this bot as you want in less than a day. In this sense, AI has a huge advantage.<p>Finally, by the time a human being can beat this version of the bot, there is going to be a much stronger version.
This represents a fairly major milestone in game A.I. doesn't it?<p>I only took one A.I. class in school and had a few that involved games as projects and remember several times the lecturers/professors (10 years ago) mentioning that Go was a next level target after chess due to extremely high branching factor.
It's so accurate to call this a Sputnik moment for China. I wonder if we'll see a face off between AlphaGo and a Chinese Go AI sometime in the future.
It would be awesome if AlphaGo were released as an online-playable version but with an adaptive difficulty. Either by choosing a desired rank or just setting it to "try to win %50 of the time" or similar.<p>I feel like that would lead to a new generation of players trained on new strategies from a blank slate. Could be interesting.<p>Disclosure: I only know the basics about playing Go :)
People who believe that AGI is too far away to be concerned about should keep in mind that very few people, even AI enthusiasts and experts, predicted 5 years ago that we would have a human-pro-level Go playing program now.<p>Prior to 2015, no programs could compete evenly with any among hundreds of Go professionals. Two years later, even the human World Champion admits that his competency is far below that of a computer program.<p>"I am quite convinced by this loss that AlphaGo is really strong. From AlphaGo there are lots of things that are worthwhile learning and exploring." -- Ke Jie<p>The time to start working on and funding AI Safety research is now.<p>Note: I am not saying that AGI is imminent. The point is that we do NOT know when it will emerge and AI Safety research is very difficult and will likely take a long time to complete.
Tomorrow there will be another story on flawed centaurs narrative which I never understand. How is the Human + AlphaGo > AlphaGo narrative not fail on smell test?
The article makes a lot of PRC censors trying to subdue news about the match. How much of this is a real tendency or cultural fear? How much of it is just an attempt to kneecap Google/Alphabet?