Re:AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5
by btilly on Thursday March 10, 2016 @12:15PM
(#11260444)
The weaknesses that it has will be of the form that it has wrong opinions about certain kinds of positions. In the case of chess, those weaknesses showed up in closed positions where the program owned the center and large amounts of space. In the case of AlphaGo, the weaknesses will be much more subtle, but will be discoverable and exploitable in time.
Additionally AlphaGo has the advantage that it started with a database of human play, so it has some ideas what kinds of positions humans miscalculate.
As for your tank vs horseback analogy, that's flawed at the moment. AlphaGo is probably reasonably close in strength to the human facing him. Improved human knowledge could tip the balance.
However in the future it will become an apt analogy. Computers are going to become so good that knowing the relative weaknesses in their style of play may reduce the handicap you need against them, but won't give you a chance of becoming even with them. That happened close to 20 years ago in chess, and is now only a question of time in Go.
Additionally AlphaGo has the advantage that it started with a database of human play, so it has some ideas what kinds of positions humans miscalculate.
As for your tank vs horseback analogy, that's flawed at the moment. AlphaGo is probably reasonably close in strength to the human facing him. Improved human knowledge could tip the balance.
However in the future it will become an apt analogy. Computers are going to become so good that knowing the relative weaknesses in their style of play may reduce the handicap you need against them, but won't give you a chance of becoming even with them. That happened close to 20 years ago in chess, and is now only a question of time in Go.