Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwringer | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say the challenge has been "solved" - the system may have only been able to win consistently because the programmers made adjustments and improvements to it between each game. Fitting its heuristics to a specific opponent might actually be overfitting unless it can consistently win against all challengers without being modified between rounds. [edited to clarify uncertainty about "why" it was able to win]

View on HN

AlphaGo played plenty of games online after the Lee Seedol match. It went 60-0 against some of the worlds best players. Granted they were fast games but that's a challenge for AlphaGo as well as its adversaries.

Thank you for this information, it will definitely be interesting to see how the future of Go plays out. For example, will players be able to train with AlphaGo to the point of being able to beat it?

Even more interesting to me is the question of if Go players will be able to apply the novel strategies of AlphaGo which break with decades of conventional wisdom or if there's something in their execution that requires such perfect play (but leads to a more certain outcome) that they're only feasibly played by AlphaGo.

I'm not sure about human players, but it might be possible to build an adversarial neural network that beats AlphaGo (and only AlphaGo).

I thought AlphaGo is trained in an adversarial manner already (it plays against itself).

The version that played against Fan Hui was reportedly trained that way, but if I recall correctly the more recent one that played Lee Sedol did't rely on self-play as much.

Also the objective was different - they tried to train a network that would play well against any opponent. It should be easier to train a network that exploits some very narrow weakness in specific AlphaGo version.

For example, my phone consistently beats me at chess. But I found a sequence of moves in one opening where is always makes the same mistake, and I after that I can win easily.

That's the sort of thing I have wondered about. Chess continues to evolve since the famous Kasparov vs. Deep Blue matches, and from a quick look around human players do continue to draw matches against the strongest computers (even though they are regularly beaten, as well).

Humans will never defeat the strongest go playing programs ever again. AlphaGo is now clearly ahead of the top pros, and such programs will only get stronger. Humans should learn some things from the machines, but we will definitely not be able to extract the full totality of understanding, and thus will naturally continue to fall behind.

The one game that Lee managed to defeat AlphaGo was probably the last time any human player was able to beat the strongest Go program at the time. That said, there are a few interesting ideas to try, and I (being a reasonably strong amateur go enthusiast myself) would love to see Google try out:

1. how many handicaps can AlphaGo give to human players, while still come out winning? the idea of handicap is basically the stronger player lets the weaker player a few "freebie moves" before the game proper starts. For reference, a typical professional player can give 2 to 3 handicaps to the strongest amateurs.

2. Can AlphaGo defeat a group of professional who are also given unlimited time to think and discuss?

Making a group of professionals with unlimited time to arrive to a common conclusion may be a harder challenge than AI. I would love to follow those discussions, but I am not sure they would ever end.

I believe the AlphaGo team estimated it to be about 2 stones stronger than top pros.

I believe that there was a sort of "learning freeze" for AlphaGo during the Lee Sedol games and there was no manual modification of its strategy either.

If I recall correctly this was part of the commentary during the matches so I can't find a good source for it right now.

https://youtu.be/l-GsfyVCBu0?t=2866

Thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for!

Thanks for bringing this up. I was recalling more recent articles that did state there were modifications each night between matches. Perhaps those were in error; I would not have commented in that case. It's a shame nobody pointed this out sooner, I could have removed the misinformation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com