Hacker News Reader

Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

Well, to nitpick, the reason anyone becomes professional is to make money, kind of by definition.

Go has something of a higher order attached, its not a sport, its a philosophy of life. Its a way to devote yourself to an art. What you do with that contribution is very important.

We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do, but as humans we are very likely to still be able to produce things computers dont. The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.

View on HN

> We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do, but as humans we are very likely to still be able to produce things computers dont.

I expect this to be the next big human activity where machines consistently beat humans within ten years.

We already have neural networks that can apply a painting style; creating a new style, and impacting a political or sentimental meaning to a painting, will soon be within grasp.

To quantify it, I offer a Turing-like test that I expect to be beat within ten years: there will be a machine-generated work of art that will be sold higher than human-made ones at an auction in which there are both human and machine works of art, but where nobody in the room knows which is which.

Pieces at that auction may be worth more specifically because of the auction and the mystique of the times.

After seeing what passes for "art" at MoMA, I wouldn't be surprised if a painting made by a neural network today were sold higher than a human-made one at an auction.

> Well, to nitpick, the reason anyone becomes professional is to make money, kind of by definition.

The definition only includes the making money part, not the reason. Many people do take money for what they do simply so they can do it full time.

>We could build robots that paint more and better than what we do.

For some definition of paint. Namely, if you give it an image created by a human; and call the computer a printer. We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

>The great question is if that is true with Go as well, or effectively, its a purely tactical game and all our philosophy, ideas and beauty appreciation is basically a projection of a silly life-form over appreciating tic-tac-toe.

Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution; one of the two players has a winning strategy. The only question we are facing is if it is feasible for us to find the winning strategy (a question which AlphaGo does not help us answer). With sufficient computational power, finding the winning strategy is trivial.

> We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

This can change very quickly. Already google's machine learning with images created a sensation like a modern-day surrealist. There is technology that produces novel classical music that has been deemed undistiguishable from a human performance.

> Is this even a question? Go is a combinatorical game. There is a solution

Everything has a solution. There are no dice. With enough information you can choose what to roll everytime. With enough information you can have all the potential conceivable paintings. Perception is a combinatorial game. Physics is a combinatorial game.

Its more of a quest of identity: what can we do that bots cant, and why, and once we understand it we move on to the next thing, until we figure out everything.

> There are no dice. With enough information you can choose what to roll everytime. With enough information you can have all the potential conceivable paintings. Perception is a combinatorial game. Physics is a combinatorial game.

Small nitpick: Modern physics wants to have a word with you.

But I think I know what you want to say.

"With sufficient computational power, the whole universe is a trivial simulation."

Sometimes, a difference in quantity is a difference in quality :-) P=NP and all that.

It feels like you're talking past each other. Conanbatt says Go will never feel the same to humans, especially humans who see Go as the purpose, the "main course", of their life. Some fundamental psychological quality is lost.

You're saying that people enjoy doing even silly, "pointless" (sic!) things for a living, like playing sports. And that you can actually make great money doing that. Money and economy are human constructs, "for monkeys by monkeys", not a physical law.

I don't see any contradiction there.

> We are nowhere near computers creating art at the quality of humans.

The same was said about playing Go. I would be careful with such statements.

The only problem about art is that we don't have a good measure for it. And for all kind of measures you could think of, I bet that it's not that hard to train some computer to beat a human in that measure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com