The way it picks moves is very similar to how top professionals do.
Intuition is reduced to memories stored vaguely as neural connections.
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..
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).
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?
Isn't most human experience an overly mystical interpretation of physics/chemistry?
The point is, the programmers don't quite understand what exactly are those features that the neural net is seeing.
They can see certain stats and high level overview.
But they have no idea what it's thinking.
They know the general pattern of the algorithm. They even explain it.
But the algorithm involves two deep neural networks, and they don't really know what's going on inside them.
One of the developers showed up during the commentary on the second game and talk about this stuff:
Well apparently my question leads to some deep mathematic theories about languages encoded by data. http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/15039/why-can-ma...
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.
Why should Go be different?
FTFY
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.
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.
(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 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.
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 ..
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.
And who can make the most interesting new go-like game?
Perhaps this could be tested with chess or checkers, even.
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.
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.
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.
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
i believe all these ancient arts are making a big comeback. the roots are still there, they just got concealed over the centures.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Howell
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cope#Discography
And they were well accepted by the music community.
Literature is not a lower form of art that we must strive to automate so that we can dedicate ourselves to more "complex" forms.
You are confusing the unknown with art.
> 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!
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.
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
Just wait until machines start producing top notch research in experimental fields such as chemistry and Physics...
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).
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.
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.
Sure. I think they will be solved in the next 100 years though.
I think that would be pretty awesome and amazing, to be honest.
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 ...
In the end all life is is one choice after another, and making good ones over bad mostly leads to a happier life.
Scary :)
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)
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.
That is a very ironically imprecise sentiment.
This can be claimed to be true when we understand how deep neural networks mathematically.
An outsider, new to the game, had managed to pick up and challenge top players successfully in a venerated game.
The reactions of community to this is uncannily similar.
"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'."
http://gobase.org/replay/?gam=/games/inter/matches/AlphaGo/L...
One interesting thing that happened during the time for Sedol's next move was that the 9th dan commentator started referring to AlphaGo as "he".
Other than the kake(shoulder hit on the right) the game might have been a regular top-prop game.
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.
Right?
Why do you think AI has no emotion, philosophy, or personality? We too are mere machines. Magnificent machines, no doubt, but machines nonetheless.
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.