I wonder how long before humans start learning from AlphaGo!
I want to see AlphaGo vs AlphaGo :-)
I want to see AlphaGo vs AlphaGo :-)
One benefit of programs like AlphaGo eventually becoming available to individuals is that we'll see a rise in some incredibly strong young players that leave their ancestors in the dust, as I think has happened with Chess via Magnus. For the amount of training that can only be done by playing more and more games, being able to do that against a computer will be a lot more efficient.
With chess, there were two breakthroughs. First, there was Deep Blue, which threw massive hardware resources at the problem and achieved world champion level play.
That was interesting, of course, but didn't really do anything for human chess, because most humans did not have access to the necessary hardware.
The second breakthrough was when the developers of chess programs that ran on commodity desktop computers improved their algorithms to the point that they could play at (and far beyond) Deep Blue's level even though they were only able to search about 1/100th as many positions per second.
That was when humans started being able to really use computers to help the humans understand chess.
The breakthroughs in chess algorithms on commodity computers had little, if anything, to do with the Deep Blue breakthrough. The two are just too different.
Can AlphaGo be made available on hardware that top human Go players have access to, or is AlphaGo to Go as Deep Blue was to chess?
Whether those insights will come soon or not is the big question.
I don't think that's actually true. The hardware that AlphaGo is on is probably a lot more powerful than the one that is available in a single human brain, the big difference is in the software.
See the difference between the very best chess programs of a decade ago versus the ones now.
Its somewhat interesting to think about the differences in marketing between IBM and Google; IBM was marketing hardware and HPC with deep blue, but Google is marketing AI when so much of their advances in AlphaGo are enabled by distributed systems and HPC running billions of games training deep neural networks. It feels a little smoke and mirrors which is probably why they won't release much until after they get enough marketing value from this tournament :)