Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Why do we count only the amount of energy the human uses during the match? After the match we can turn the machine off, making it use no energy. Humans need to spend 50+% of their time doing stuff that isn't even related to the activities we're measuring (eat, sleep, do laundry, drink wine with friends), and 99% of the rest on 'training'.

I fail to see why energy-parity comparisons are 'more fair' or 'better'. We don't have soccer matches for people who eat nothing but two sandwiches a day, do we? Has a marathon winner cheated if he ate a few bananas during the race and the runner up hasn't? Of course not (well, 'of course' to me, it seems that the OP might disagree?).

I guess we could move on to comparing sporting wins by people who used steroids, but that would just stray from the actual point.

View on HN

Also, it's fairly easy to replicate the Go-playing machine while good human Go players are very rare (and how about counting the resources needed to produce an environment where such a player can develop? Then again we could count the resources going into developing computer hardware...), and they cannot be predictably "produced."

Describing this as "a computer beats a human for the first time but using a lot of energy" somewhat misrepresents it because a Go bot running on a mobile device will wipe the floor with the vast majority of humans - and most amateur players, because there's a power law distribution with these things and so most players who're any good, including bots, are better than the majority of players (while at the same time being not even remotely interesting to play with for a very large number of stronger players.)

The point is that any mobile device can be "trained" with a few clicks to wipe the floor with most humans, for whom to catch up with the bot would require a lot of energy (and perhaps isn't always possible.) Does it make phones smarter the people? I dunno, but it certainly shows that these comparisons are never "fair" and the only real question is what practical implications of "intelligence" you care about, then you can evaluate things meaningfully.

Well, motor vehicle races are generally broken up by how much horsepower the car has, right? Or boxing matches by weight class?

Interesting angle that I hadn't considered.

That said, I don't think it's the same. Vehicles and fighters are classified in various ways (power/weight, but also experience, e.g. pro and amateur classes) because otherwise the competition becomes 'who has the best engineering team' and not 'who drives best'; or 'who has most fighting skills' and not 'who can overpower his opponent through sheer force/mass'. It's purely to keep it interesting and/or exciting.

In this case, I interpreted the argument made in the OP as 'it only becomes an achievement when the computer constrains itself to the boundaries the human has by its nature'. I don't see the point of that. An F1 car is unarguably faster than 50cc kart. If we talk about 'who can drive the fastest', it doesn't make sense to say 'it's not a 'fair' comparison'. It is, and the F1 car is faster, period.

The nature of the past match was 'who is the best Go player, no holds barred'. Call it the UFC 1 of Go. Back in 1994 in UFC 1 there were no weight classes, no restrictions on techniques - the question was 'who is the best fighter'. It's not like after that event the sumo guy said 'yeah well I can't move as fast because I'm 200kg, so we'll only know who is the best fighter after a jiu jitsu guy fights me but doesn't move faster than I do'.

I guess there is more nuance to the debate than I originally thought. I still think it doesn't make sense to impose artificial limits. We might have tournaments for humans and tournaments for machines in the future, just like we have nascar and F1. But there is no mistake who is the best player.

>I interpreted the argument made in the OP as 'it only becomes an achievement when the computer constrains itself to the boundaries the human has by its nature'

I don't think this is a particularly accurate interpretation considering the author says:

>Now, not to diminish the achievement of the AlphaGo team, what they have done is nothing short of incredible

I think a more charitable interpretation can be found by looking at the closing paragraph which starts with this line:

>So now the interesting question (to me at least) is: How long before a computer will beat the human Go world champion using no more power than the human.

I think too much examination may get to the point where the competition analogy isn't helpful. The point is, OK, that is a major achievement, but now can we make it work using standard consumer hardware? To bring another analogy into the mix, the current situation is as though we've gotten a team of members of our chess club who get to all consult each other during the match and don't have to follow the clock to beat a chess grandmaster -- a major achievement, to be sure, but we can hardly call ourselves his equal.

We could consider lifetime costs. A human requires other humans to build, takes 16+ years to grow to reasonable capacity, can't work 24/7 or even a consistent 40 hours a week...

That's why I fully expect supermarkets to have drastically reduced labor costs in a few years, as shelved goods will be restocked by micro-forklift robots, checkouts will be automated and the human staff is reduced to two or three supervisory and customer-relations positions.

Except AlphaGo isn't eating 2 fingers of banana; it's eating enough quantity to starve a whole suburb. See the OP as a finger pointing direction of what the next exciting challenge is instead of as a criticism of the success of DeepMind/AlphaGo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com