Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambler | Hacker News Reader

When reading such news I always get the feeling that the game is stacked in favor of the computer. Not in the sense of rules, but in the sense of media coverage and interpreting the results. It seems like a lot of people in AI and IT are pretty desperate for validation of their notions about human (un)intelligence.

Watch 'Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine' for a good description of what I mean. And yes, I bet many people here hate that movie. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

There are a lot of relatively simple chess programs that can beat most amateur players. Personally, I cannot beat the Go program I have on my cellphone. (I am pretty horrible at the game.) None of that seems newsworthy. And yet after 5 wins against a pretty strong (but not world's best) Go player, and it's suddenly a "breakthrough" that changes everything.

If some new chess player have beat Deep Blue 4 to 2, would we revert the perceived status of AI to what it was before that match with Kasparov?

I'm not saying this advance in AI is unimpressive. I just don't see a fair evaluation of what it means. There is too much one-directional hype.

> If some new chess player have beat Deep Blue 4 to 2, would we revert the perceived status of AI to what it was before that match with Kasparov?

Not saying I disagree with much of your comment, but I think the answer to that question is actually, "yes". As a middling chess player, I think it would have been impossible for "a new chess player" to have beaten Deep Blue 4 to 2, and these days, it requires near-best-in-the-world prowess to pick up any games at all off the best chess computers, which I think proves that it wasn't hype-y or unfair to claim that the machines have beaten us at this.

Hype is hype, whether it turns out to be justified or not. Not all people can beat even a trivial Go program.

You may be missing my larger point. It is not about whether humans can beat the best chess or Go computers. It is about a very strong bias in favor of algorithms in general. The dynamics around human vs computer chess matches simply demonstrated this bias in an easily percievable form. Who cared about Kasparov's later victories and draws against other state of the art programs? They received very little coverage.

Chess is just a game. The important thing to consider is what will happen when algorithms start to competre with people in more complex and ambiguous areas.

I understand your larger point, but that's just how news works: you report on the new stuff, not the old stuff. Humans beating computers at chess was old news when Deep Blue happened, so it wasn't worth reporting when that happened. Nobody talks about computers beating humans at chess anymore, because that's old news now. It would be (really big) news again if a human started beating the best chess computers again.

It is old news for humans to beat computers at Go, but the reverse is still new news.

I agree with you that people who infer an impending AI takeover of the world from computer success in specific games are just being silly.

Well, I think that the hype is one-directional because the default assumption is that machines will lose to humans in tasks that involve reasoning. We know that there's no computer that can learn to put away the dishes after watching a person do it, so there's nothing to talk about and nothing to hype.

It's a milestone in the progress in AI. It's been nearly 20 years since Deep Blue beat Kasparov and an obvious next goal was Go. They're not quite there yet but it looks like next year.

There was a statement in the movie that went something like, "After Deep Blue was announced the winner, IBM's stock jumped 15%" I took a look at the historical data Yahoo(?) had for that date and there was no spike at all for IBM.

They frame it as some huge setup by IBM, but to me, it just seemed like Kasparov got psyched out and thrown off his game.

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