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Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

>This would be akin to a robot being given access to thousands of metal bits and parts, but no knowledge of a combustion engine, then it experiments numerous times with every combination possible until it builds a Ferrari.

No, not even close. First, AlphaZero started with the rules of chess, chess pieces, and a chess board. Second, the possible moves are several orders of magnitude fewer than the steps needed to build a working car out of parts.

Closer would be: Here's a car. Here are all the tuneable parameters. Make it as fast or as efficient as possible. But that would still be inordinately more complex then groking chess.

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Nitpicking. It is an analogy. The author said nothing of whether an AI could actually build a car. That's not the point of an analogy. Some of the most renowned physicists use balloons and balls to describe space-time, but space isn't a balloon - does that make their layman explanation bad?

> rules of chess

Just like "AlphaEngine" would have the rules of reality: physics.

> several orders of magnitude

Sharpshooting. Go (the other game that it plays) has more positions than there are atoms in the universe. Not having to evaluate every position is precisely the improvement that AlphaGo brings to the table.

For the record I don't think that AlphaGo could build a car and, even if it somehow could, the universe would likely experience heat death before it arrived at a workable solution.

This is not nitpicking. This is actually quite important. The entire AI hype rides on such irresponsible analogies. These analogies completely obscure the actual state of the art and fuel some outrageous expectations (not to mention the singularity cult).

> Closer would be: Here's a car. Here are all the tuneable parameters. Make it as fast or as efficient as possible. But that would still be inordinately more complex then groking chess.

Reminds me of BoxCar2D from 2011: http://www.boxcar2d.com/

>Second, the possible moves are several orders of magnitude fewer than the steps needed to build a working car out of parts.

Aren't the number of chess moves, for practical purposes, near infinite? A car can be made only in so many ways, but a chess game can be won under scenarios that outnumber the atoms in the universe.

In the same way that the AI’s series of chess moves don’t have to lead anywhere near victory, the system doesn’t have to build anything that resembles a car.

With this consideration, there are many more ways to go wrong in the car scenario.

Chess moves are limited by the chess piece selection and board.

Building something IRL isn’t really limited by anything; For example, you could combine just two pieces in hundreds of ways (tape, staple, weld, etc), in unlimited number of positions (off by 1mm, off by 2mm, off by 3mm, etc).

Wasn't chess solved early because the number of possible moves within the next x moves is limited? I think that's the main difference to Go where a bruteforce approach doesn't work.

Chess hasn't been solved; that would mean knowing the perfect strategy, and whether the first or second player can always force a win or a draw.

Examples of games that have been solved include reversi, gomoku, connect four and draughts.

Chess has 16 pieces each in one of 65 positions, so the state space is roughly 65^16. A car has more than 16 parts each in more than 65 possible positions.

There are around 100 legal moves for any chess position, and only a handful of rules. The possible actions and rules for building cars is literally all of physics and engineering.

> Chess has 16 pieces each in one of 65 positions, so the state space is roughly 65^16.

This is a correct upper bound, but the state space is much smaller than that, as the only position that two pieces can share is "captured".

Edit: it's not a correct upper bound (or at least, it may be larger than the state space, but only by coincidence), in that while there are at most 16 pieces, the pawns may be in an officer state rather than a pawn state.

I didn't read it that way. You're essentially reading it as the monkeys will eventually write Shakespeare scenario.

The way I read it was, you have a robot and it:

1. knows it has to build a ferrari (implying it knows what it looks like at least)

2. knows nothing about building, parts, etc

3. can engage in some sort of learning behavior

Once a robot knows it can only connect two parts by screwing them together, it will only try to screw them together, and it might even transfer that behavior over to other parts.

The possible scenarios become much more limited as the robot gets smarter.

> Once a robot knows it can only connect two parts by screwing them together, it will only try to screw them together, and it might even transfer that behavior over to other parts.

Why would learning to screw invalidate other means of connecting things? Why not use an adhesive? Or weld the parts together? Or shape the materials so they can be joined without a separate fastener, like a dovetail or something. Even if it learns those, how does it know there isn't some way of connecting two parts by a chemical means that humans haven't discovered?

This wouldn't work for a human being who knows nothing about making automobiles, so why would it work for a robot?

You're probably imagining an assembly line, where one step follows another in a logical procession, and there doesn't seem to be much of a branching factor. However, each step along that line is the process of many deep optimizations. It is more complicated than you think; thousands of people work on it. Consider just the case of choosing a screw, probably one of the most simple steps in building a car. These 24 pages only scratch the surface of the choices available: http://www.fastecindustrial.com/images/MediaCatFastener.pdf

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