Go master Lee Se-dol says he quits, unable to win over AI Go players
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I've heard it said that man landing on the moon was like that for them, but I didn't understand as it was the only world I knew.
Now I can appreciate that these were the firsts of many singularities yet to come in AI and space exploration and I hope to live to witness a few more (but not too many).
(Edit) To those who think self-driving is a well-defined problem: it can be in some remote areas, but imagine driving in bustling city streets with kids, bicycles and dogs. The driving problem becomes a communication problem.
Humans arrive safe and unhurt (as much as possible, especially while human drivers remain on the road) at their destination with minimal violation of the locality's established rules of the road. No?
(Though now that I've written what amounts to a utility function, I fear what sort of paperclips may come out of it.)
My respect for AI increased drastically that day, and (honestly) I developed a small amount of fear due to how AlphaGo’s style of play was not understood particularly well (e.g., some of the moves would absolutely be called “slack” if played by a human).
It used to be that you might be able to believe that there is some kind of art behind go, some sort of abstract beauty to it, and that the pursuit of this beauty is the path to being good at go ...
But the defeat of the tactics born from this mindset by MCTS at least for now lay bare the fact that the path to being good at go is actually to probabilistically sample the phase space of the game and perform impossibly mindless statistics on the game outcome an enormous number of times ...
To top it off — there is almost nothing “about go” to learn from watching alpha go play ... I imagine that attempting to analyze alpha go’s victories would produce an unending sequence of the feeling of never gaining any new insight “into go”.
The analysis of go is now about optimizing algorithms — which _is_ interesting — but I don’t think it’s interesting for the same reasons that someone might’ve been passionate about go in the past ...
All but the last phrase are still true. Pursuit of Go for beauty is still pursuit of Go for beauty.
I will never play any instrument as well as a sequencer. I believe algorithms will make beautiful Jazz improvisations in real time, in my lifetime. But playing is still beautiful.
I will never run as fast as a horse, much less a bicycle or car. In my lifetime cars will drive themselves more safely and faster than I can drive a car. It will still be enjoyable.
I sincerely hope my children will live better lives and make better choices than I did. My life is still beautiful most days...
It is our attachment to being smarter than machines that makes us unhappy. We fear evidence that we’re not that special. But we do not need to be special to be happy. We do not need to be special to find beauty in our pursuits.
One day, a bot will live on HN and have hundreds of times more karma than I have. It won’t diminish the beauty of my best contributions. Perhaps the humility of seeing this happen will actually make me a happier person.
I think that as machines become smarter and smarter, it is good that we dive a bit more in our philosophical world and reach for what makes us human.
It took me a long time to understand that if you remove the pure rational intellect, something precious still remains: the driving force that shapes our morals. There is not rational reason to like survival. To love our children, to do what we call good. The resons for that are moral and are, I believe, what defines us as human at the core.
Ian Banks was spot on in calling a future civilization a "Culture". Because when machines take over the productive work, defining our values is going to be our full time activity. Machines may participate, but why would they add anything we consider valuable to the core?
That's going to be an interesting transition and I am happy that I'll probably live to see it!
Of course there is and very well described in evolutionary science
That's a recurring theme in Ghost in the Shell, at least the anime series. That as the line between human and machine is blurred, the general trend is in the direction of homogeneity, but here and there you still see people doing "deontological" things, ostensibly as a grasp at uniqueness to preserve self.
An interesting thought occurs to me though, with the proliferation of various NN architectures, and the idea that such nets, if scaled and installed to power humanoid robots, would effectively learn different heuristics after training on chaotically different data, it's quite possible that machines will also gradually evolve individuality and something rather close to personality.
Perhaps individuality is an intrinsic, emergent property in any system of generally intelligent and learning agents. Like a 3+ body on steroids, millions, if not billions of dimensions.
Also interesting to consider that the emergence of uniqueness among a system of said agents seems to increase entropy, a presently unique to life property given that everything inanimate in the universe does exactly the opposite. The more I think of general AI, the more I have trouble distinguishing it from the only other sentient intelligence we know of.
You have to remember the specific comparison and the art that humans tried to partake in to master go.
Humans do not run to beat horses. We never compete. That would be silly.
Cars and humans also do not compete at the 100 meter dash.
If humans and robots compete at 100 meter dash than the olympics will similarly lose its luster.
I hate to be that guy, but:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
It is very silly indeed.
It's like watching 1-v-100 boxing match. Of course the 100 are going to win.
Enjoyable sport has always been about ~similarly matched opponents. When we have DeepMind AI Go vs. MindDeep AI Go, that's when things get interesting.
Human existence will still occur, however, our species's defining characteristic will be no more consequential than a meadowlark's greeting of the sun every morning. Beautiful things will occur, but they will be ghostly imitations of the creations of some other being. Humans will create nothing, except, possibly, more humans.
It's not necessarily about your success vs. the machines. It's about every human who will ever live in the future's impossibility of success vs. the machines that is depressing and inevitable.
You are begging the question in in the original sense of the phrase "begging the question."
You start by stating your conclusion as an axiom! You state that "no human contribution matters because a different species already thought of it" as if that is necessarily true.
It isn't.
We choose what matters. I play Bach, badly. Bach already thought of that music, and many thousands, possibly millions of people have played the particular pieces I have worked on (The first suite for unaccompanied cello in Gmaj, the Prelude to the first Fuge in Cmaj from Book One of WTC).
Does my playing not matter?
I say it does. Furthermore, Bach's music can be encoded as a number. All numbers already exist. Bach did not create that number any more than I created the number that encodes this comment.
Does my comment not matter?
You find this general idea depressing, and so do many other people.
But it isn't "depressing" in an absolute sense. That's just a word we made up to describe a feeling many of us happen to have.
It's like watching 1-v-100 boxing match. Of course the 100 are going to win.
Enjoyable sport has always been about ~similarly matched opponents. When we have DeepMind AI Go vs. MindDeep AI Go, that's when things get interesting.
Having dug quite deep into algorithmic music generation of all sorts, as well as having studied Machine Learning as my uni masters, I still believe that you still need an actual artist to make a music generator program.
A machine simply isn't going to figure out "swing" if you don't tell it to. And swing is one of the easiest things. Yes if you look just at note generation, I think algorithms can go a long way. But the subtleties of timing and timbre, it can only imitate in context. Which definitely is good enough for many purposes, and I agree with your prediction that algorithms will be able to generate beautiful music, but I also think there will always remain an "edge" for the artist. If only to discover novel things that are also cool, and then working those out in order to fully express the coolness of that new thing.
I'm also thinking about all the evolutions the many genres of electronic music have gone through the past decades. New and novel "sounds" (or moods, or styles, etc) are still being create/discovered. It is that process, that I don't think we're there yet. Yes the algorithm can probably generate beautiful psytrance, lo-fi hiphop beats and if I'm generous probably eventually also really complex (and jazzy!) stuff like squarepusher.
But what I'm not seeing happening any time soon (barring any breaking general AI type of advances) is if you give the algorithm a TB-303 for the first time and see if it figures out acid house. Yes you can probably teach it the origins of neurofunk DnB (think 1999 Optical & Ed Rush's Wormhole album) and produce super awesome dance music. But I don't see how it could ever develop what happened to DnB beyond that. Wavetable synthesis didn't really exist that way back then, and the bass came from more classic synthesis like the Reese bass. Nowadays, what you can do with a wavetable synth VST like Serum, almost defines what modern DnB sounds like. That particular sound was evolved and shaped through the genre of drum'nbass and became part of it, a new style of synthesis, heavily facilitated through the particular UX controls of these synth plugins, which again caused the author of Serum to amplify by creating his vision of what this UX should be like, is almost like the birth of a new instrument, together with artists having to learn the correct style to "play" this instrument. Which has settled enough now that it is appearing in other new genres. Yet is also still developing. And that is just one genre of music I happen to be somewhat familiar with, I'm sure similar examples can be named in many other genres (for instance I don't know much about the history of dubstep).
Those evolutionary steps, invention of truly novel things, for the foreseeable future, I don't think AI is there yet and artists do still have an edge, even if it's a very thin one.
I agree with the sentiment that one can't be good at everything, and that there is a radically high-performance exemplar for anything, but for machines to dominate in almost every category of luxury endeavour -- yes I can see that as demoralizing. Even the useless things we spend our time on, we can be no good at that.
This is a rationalist opinion that is attractive because it appears unbiased, unwilling to make any concessions to human nature and to recognise its limitations.
And yet- this same opinion overlooks the greatest source of scientific wonderment in the victories of AlphaGo and family against the best human players.
Which is to say: that human players play Go (and Chess, and Poker, and Magic: the Gathering etc) very differently than machines. In particular, human players do none of the extremely tedious, extremely computationally intensive maths that computer players have to do. Human players don't perform MCTS, neither do they train by self-play for many thousands of human-years.
Somehow, humans can play Go and Chess and all manner of board games _without_ having to do any of the hard work that only computers can do reliably. We are not particularly good at those games- but we can play them well enough that beating the best of us still takes huge amounts of computational power.
How we do this, why we are even capable of doing this and what other benefits it confers to us: _that_ is the interesting set of questions. That a big machine can outperform a human ... we have known this since ancient times.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)This sounds like a Chinese room argument.
Performing computationally expensive maths doesn’t make the computer intelligent.
But that says nothing about the intelligence of the maths itself.
Also, sure, you can dismiss it all as statistics. But how sure are you that what's happening with humans isn't in some form? I'd also say that MCTS is something people kind of do too in games: look a few moves deep and try to judge the value of that position, which is definitely more interesting than simple RL/bookkeeping/stats.
Do people keep around versions of “alpha go year 2017” and play against it in order to measure human improvement over time?
If the basis for observing improvement has become “I can beat old versions of the ai more reliably than I used to be able to” or if I have learned to beat players who have not studied alpha zero I suppose that’s a form of usefully learning “about go” by analyzing the games played by alpha zero ...
I wonder if we might ever arrive at a point where human vs fixed-year x ai performance at go pretty much stops increasing over time ...?
Another correction about what you said is that computer go has brought tremendous evolutions to the pro scene. Josekis that were accepted for centuries have been challenged, and people have learned why. The value of sente has been emphasized, and pro players that have not learned are being pusshed out. In that aspect, computer go has brought change of a magnitude comparable to the shin fuseki movement.
Finally, it is expected that the availability of strong programs will bring a wave of better players, much like what happened in chess. I for one look forward to this happening.
I had always thought there was some element of recognizing its “impossible to ever even remotely approach a true grinding of the combinations” for go — and that somehow players _did something else_ effectively when they played at a high level. It’s that “doing something else effectively” that the defeat of humanity by go algorithms challenges ...
Would be super Interesting if there could ever be a reversal which might allow humanity to beat go algorithms once again ... is there any evidence from the strategies that the go community has learned by analyzing the new go algorithms that this could be possible? Or is there just more and more evidence over time than humans will never be able to compete effectively at go again?
It is not imaginable now that humans will beat a machine in the future, but it is also undeniable that humans progressed from computer go. The evolution of joseki (game patterns considered fair for both players), especially corner joseki are material evidence of that.
But, while you sit there waxing creative, your brain cells are likewise performing a mindless task on an enormous scale.
There is art! It's just an emergent property of learning the game. Seeking art doesn't make you a better player - that's the trap one can easily fall in any sports. It's the opposite - efficient strategies solidify as art.
The main issue in determining man or machine in each situation eventually will be which has the lower TOC.
I think an interesting issue here is that in the (far) future, many services could be performed cheaper by AI/robots and in such a way that the customer is unable to tell wether a human is involved or not. And in this future, humans will probably be a premium service.
Take motor sports for example. We can probably now/soon replace F1 drivers with algorithms and cameras, but nobody would pay 1000's of USD to watch them drive around in Monaco. If it would turn out someday that the drivers had been replaced (for safety reasons or whatever) without telling the fans, the outcry would be tremendous. And even if outcry does not always equal "true utility", I think it highlights my point: humans made of flesh and blood risking their lives or performing extraordinary feats have an intrinsic economic value that can't be replaced.
(If you don't want to click the link, there's a joke there that machines may have a hard time "being to cool to care about stuff.")
That's not true.
Q: How much better is AI now compared to when Lee was playing against AlphaGo?
"It has increased enormously. It is only natural for the pros to lose a couple of spots. That's why most of the pros study baduk with AI."
Korean News Interview: http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=2019...
I’d be curious to know if that’s incorrect ...
Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1002/
That's a playlist of 31 self-play games analyzed by Michael Redmond 9p. They are plenty interesting to study.
If Lee Sedol says "Okay AlphaGo, let's play!" and sits down at a board what happens? Nothing happens! AlphaGo has no agency. AlphaGo is an extension of human agency. AlphaGo isn't better than humans at Go. Humans with AlphaGo are better at Go than humans without AlphaGo.
AI is the future of Go because it enables those new perspectives and new processes by which human players can learn. AI is smart-dumb, looking for patterns beyond the human capacity, but limited by the data on existing human players that has been provided to them.
Strava hasn't made running races pointless. I can compare my runs to others but that is a very different metric then beating them in a head to head race.
I think you misunderstand how AI in games like go now works. Most of the advancements recently have been from the AI playing itself, oftentimes without any database of human moves at all.
Except it isn't. In various games, new strategies have been found by playing AI vs AI. It's also possible to create AI players by self-play with no knowledge of human matches.
What makes recent breakthroughs in AI agents playing adversarial games possible is the fact that deep neural networks are able to develop patterns that yield short- and long-term strategic planning. And the ability to self train without human intervention to reach unprecedented training levels.
But the ability to play Go never matters outside of playing Go, and we know who is the best at playing Go.
> He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee.
> "... [I] have something else to do," he said, asserting his only dream for now is to rest and spend time with his family.
Edit: Meant to include the part where he's planning a high profile set of games against another ai.
I have to say, I'm just continually puzzled by this. In this thread, yours is the only comment where it appears that the commenter read beyond the first few paragraphs. There are numerous comments by people speaking authoritatively on go and AlphaGo, who have clearly not studied either significantly.
If people like the comments better than the articles, it's not so surprising that they like to spend time reading and writing comments instead of reading the articles.
Lee's issues with the KBA are not a secret and he has discussed possibly retiring for some time now. He has given multiple reasons as to why he was considering retiring and while ai might be one of them, saying that its _the_ reason feels very clickbaity.
Hard for me to empathize with this argument for his retirement. If we can't outrun a car, does that make running competitions pointless? The existence of AlphaGo doesn't diminish the triumph of being a number one human player in any way.
It's in matters of intellect that humans still believe they are #1.
AlphaGO's achievement in another field would have similar effects, e.g.:
- An AI that diagnoses sickness better than any doctor
- An AI that generates text which humans believe more beautiful than any other poetry created
- An AI which creates classical arrangements the likes of which we compare to Mozart
I would imagine that in any of those situations some doctors, authors, and musicians alike would be devastated.
You don't even have to compare yourself to AI for this mentality though. There are people who choose not to compete in things because they don't believe they'll ever be as good as other humans.
I assume must composers don't go into music thinking they are going to be as great as Beethoven.
I believe there are many studies that show that if you only do something because you think you're good at it, you're likely to drop off. I imagine it's also why you're supposed to praise children for being hard working and not for being smart or talented.
Making a classical arrangement that evokes a particular expression in the listener is the job of the musician. If an AI system helps you explore the possibilities there, it's more like a studio musician that's able to improvise. You're still the person, the human, the emotional filter, that picks "This sounds right" or "This doesn't" for a particular situation. It's a judgement call. An emotional one.
An AI might be able to fake it, communicate with it, but it will never replace humans choosing the sounds that please them more than others. Humans communicate through music. It wouldn't surprise me that an AI would be able to as well. I don't think it would necessarily write emotionally strong music, not without human training.
Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure, computers might be able to make music. Ask any guy who messes with modular synthesizers. But they're a tool. The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself. It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."
I'm not so sure. I often go into threads on HN and realize that every idea I could come up with on the subject has already been expressed better than I could do it, with greater expertise, and cited sources. I don't comment in those threads. If AI bots could populate a thread with every likely human thought and argue it with depth and sophistication in a well reasoned, yet carefully approachable and well-explained way, well then... again I don't think I'd feel like I would be adding much value by participating.
I think this is the key; if you're making music for your own reasons, no AI (or Mozart) would stop you. But if you're trying to make money at it, or desperately want listeners, you may eventually be on the "losing" side.
So music generation (similar to poetry) is imo a completely different problem space altogether.
Neither art nor music are competitive activities. Good poetry is a wonderful thing, no matter the source.
They certainly are! Especially when money is on the line, and the best musicians, actors, and artists are extremely well compensated making their positions extraordinarily competitive.
>Good poetry is a wonderful thing, no matter the source.
Sure, but I think you neglect to consider the defeating feeling it would bring to dedicate your entire life to mastery of a subject only to be completely and utterly, hopelessly outclassed. Almost every such person is already hopelessly outclassed by someone in their field, but those people are so rare that they have tremendous exclusivity surrounding them. Compare that to the scenario of having any 12 year old with a smart phone being able to instantly produce a totally novel and dominate piece of artistic expression developed by an algorithm on their phone. Then recognize that in a world with that level of AI sophistication, there'd be very little of value that a human can even offer other humans at that point. It would be... not great to the psyche, economy, or society.
Take a look at this painting: [1]
It is a comment on war, bravery, death, life, fear, sacrifice. It is drenched in the political and social context of the day.
I really don't see AI coming up with anything even remotely like this independently, and view such an achievement to be much harder than simply diagnosing disease or writing an emotionally moving classical composition. It would be comparable to writing some types of poetry or song lyrics, however, which require reference to context that humans understand but machines don't (yet).
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/El...
Hrm, I do think that AI would be able to create narratives that humans find more enjoyable than the work of other humans, and I agree that AI would be able to create pictures and sound that humans find to be more enjoyable to look at or hear than the raw work of humans. AI can master the technical feats of composition and art.
But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us. It wont ever be able to create a Guernica. It wont be able to create a Crime and Punishment. It wont understand what it is to be human and mortal, what suffering is, and it wont be able to look within itself and find what those things mean to it and then share that with us, because in the end it's just a bunch of code running statistical computations. It wont fear death, it wont have children it cares about or a family history to look on and tell us about. It has nothing of emotive value to share.
That belief grew into a sort of shared perception that they were artists in pursuit of a perfect expression of their art. For many top players that belief was ingrained from an early age. They believed themselves to be doing a service to the world, making it a better place by creating new art that was a unique expression of themselves.
And then AlphaGo (and successors) shattered that worldview. This is part of the natural sequence of the collapse of a suddenly, surprisingly invalidated worldview. Part of me feels sorry that he has lost his place in the world. Another part of me firmly believes in the mediocrity principle, and that the worldview he represents was obviously far too human-chauvenistic to be correct, and it's a good thing it's dying.
And part of me hopes you can give up your human-chauvenism before the same thing happens to you.
... says a bunch of neurons that run on chemical reactions and electrical impulses. I think this line of thinking reeks of dualism - it creates a special something that is above explanation, a different essence.
But seriously, I believe the difference comes from embodiment. When we embody our AI friends they will be able to grasp purpose and meaning. We get our meaning from 'the game', when AIs will be players they will understand much better. Let them try out their ideas on the world and see the outcomes, grasp at causality, have a purpose and work on it. This will fill the missing piece. It's not that they are fundamentally limited, it's that we have the benefit of having a body that can interact with the world. Already AIs that work in simulated worlds (board games, video games) are getting better than us. We can't simulate reality in all its glory, and it is expensive to create robotic bodies. On the other hand humans and our ancestors have had access to the world from the beginning.
Of course, current AI can't even make an 8th grader's essay (which is not to say that it isn't impressive). But what these artists did was not magic. As far as we can tell, the brain is a purely physical entity. Unless you believe in dualism, which would be fair enough, there is no reason to suppose that what we do could not be replicated by something "artificial".
But it won't need to. All it will need to do is manifest the same end-product via whatever means, no matter how vacuous or computational that means may truly be. The suffering of an artist is relevant only inasmuch as it is responsible for producing the art. If the same end-product can be manifested via a mere computation then our criteria of "art" is still satisfied. In a world in which provenance cannot be established, the ostensible mortality of the artist becomes moot.
At a low enough level, our brain seems to be just a bunch of neurons firing impulses at various rates that can be described as statistical computations. Why be so sure that the right neural network wouldn't understand what it is to be human and mortal, understand suffering, have emotive value, etc?
This is your opinion, but you then go to mention things that are not necessary to create "art that speaks to us" (look within itself and find what mortality means etc.).
What if we advance AI reasoning skills to a point that it can find high-level patterns in how artists go from different human feelings (as described in litterature and other mediums), takes in a lot of the entities we can relate to (animals, what humans look like, etc.) and some aesthetic ones (shapes, colorometry, textures, ...) to create a new piece of art that optimizes for: "Likelihood of speaking to us"?
What then? It seems like an AI doesn't need to be mortal and self aware to do something like that.
“How the clouds Seem to me birds, birds in God's garden! I dare not! The clouds are as a breath, the leaves are flakes of fire, That clash i' the wind and lift themselves from higher!”
As someone who grew up in Appalachia, I have never in my life encountered a more visual, visceral description of autumn leaves than ‘flakes of fire’. It’s perfection, and maybe a single human is behind it, but more likely we all wrote it.
Take a look at what AlphaGo did when it suddenly found itself in a hopeless situation and compare it to how people behave when panicked.
I dread the day AI realizes that we are the cause of their suffering, and that we didn't think about it because "they're just algorithms".
> But what I doubt AI will ever be able to do is create art that speaks to us.
that's confusing.
But that doesn't detract from people playing Ukelele.
Of course, for a music academic, copying someone's style like this war pointless and his compositions were more modern/contemporary.
This leads us to a useful distinction between pursuits with one end goal (be the best/strongest/fastest), and those with naturally many endpoints and expressions.
The doctor could be replaced though or used as a secondary verifier.
The song is a funny thing. It could be given to a cool looking group and do well. It could be given to someone older and flop. The song is just part of it.
I am worried about the ability of an AI to generate an infinite number of Dresden Files or Cosmere books on demand, because I already drop everything when a new one comes out and read without sleeping until I am finished.
People are afraid of themselves I believe. It’s not really about “job loss”.
I’m not sure if most people realise AI means pretty specific models built to solve rather specific problems. They think SkyNet.
The one physical activity at which humans excel is long-distance running.
Do you mean that human intelligence is not general enough to recreate functions of existing physical structure that implements general intelligence?
About that... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618308
Not in the case of our household cat. He isn't called TheBlob for nothing (out of his hearing of course!)
There's something axiomatic there, if you assume an identical piece of music that was either written by a human or by a computer, then for many listeners it's by definition more satisfying to know it came from a person, because of what it says about the person.
And for those listeners, if a human "composer" is discovered to have lied about it (saying they wrote it when it was actually a computer), then those listeners would reinterpret their views of the music and consider the "composer" a fraud.
And even a programmer of algorithmic music might have emotional intent, but if the musical output is unknown to the programmer, they did not have the emotional impulse to create that music in particular. While it can be appreciated as its own thing, it's a step removed from the music itself, and qualitatively different than human-composed music.
What about Go? No animal or machine could play it as well as humans do.. until AlphaGo came along. I think that is where the sense of loss comes from.
But your point is well taken; it is also applicable to this article as well: maybe Go is not the game people can beat machines, but StarCraft 6 could be. Or maybe I can fold my laundry more efficiently than any machine available.
Cars and legs are apples and oranges. We have a car racing category, motorsport. Racing categories have very tightly defined specs to keep driver skill in the game. Stock cars and open wheelers limit how much traction control they can use otherwise it becomes too easy.
This is like cyborg legs being invented and smashing all the records. It would take some of the shine off running for sure.
A Professional Go player is an explorer of truth in a millenarian board, spelunking in a vast universe of possibilities. The purpose of playing is attacked when there is an automated, effortless way to do that exploring faster and better. Why look for new things when a computer can find 100 in a minute?
The professional mindset of a Go player differs vastly from the amateur mindset.
Just imagine if Garry Kasparov quit after losing to Deep Blue, he would be ridiculed today by the chess community which is still going strong. Instead, he accepted defeat, moved on, and is regarded as one of the greatest chess players ever. I doubt the same will be said of Lee Sedol 20 years down the line if this is how he chooses to end his professional Go career.
Cyborg chess is the future of chess. Period. Chess players use computers to train themselves and explore openings in human-only settings, while programmers / cyborgs play correspondence chess.
Go is not finished as a game. A new tool, MCTS + Neural nets, has been developed to explore the "truth" behind the game at ever increasing rates. Its not about how to beat the tool, the question is how to best utilize the tool to improve self-play and self-learning in the game of Go.
Or alternatively: how to best use the tool to play ever more perfect games of Go.
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Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of cell phones. We all use our cyborg-capabilities to search the internet and fact-check ourselves every day. Programmers use stack-overflow to teach themselves programming and remember obscure details (using our cyborg capabilities to tag, search, and sift through information ever faster and faster).
Go is the same thing, except we only learned how to become cyborgs two years ago.
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Give the world-champions each a copy of AlphaGo on equal computers. Have them play Go against each other WITH computer assistance. I guarantee you that a more beautiful and perfect game will result. Let us welcome the age of Cyborg Go as we step into the future, we shouldn't be scared of it. We've become cyborgs in many other tasks, and Go is no different.
Sure and any of us could jump on a motorcycle and fly past Usain Bolt in the 100m, but that kind of misses the whole point of the competition.
> Give the world-champions each a copy of AlphaGo on equal computers. Have them play Go against each other WITH computer assistance.
Won't the winner be the one who just takes AlphaGo's recommended move every time without changing anything?
The impression I got from Lee Se-dol in the Netflix documentary was that he had a lot of his identity tied up in this (particularly being the best Go player in the world). Not a huge surprise given the time and effort required to do it, but there's probably a healthier mental framing (I think Kasparov has a healthier one).
If people give up on learning or doing something every time someone or something else can do it better then there's going to be a lot of disappointment as things continue to move forward.
No. Consider this scheme.
I take my copy of AlphaGo and for a full year, I'll build a database of all opening positions AlphaGo is willing to explore. I'll rank these opening positions from "best" (Black-wins with most consistency) to "worst" (White-wins with most consistency).
I'll put all of this information into a 16TB database on a singular, $400 16TB Hard drive, and load it into my computer during the contest. https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-002P-015K6
If you dare to pick AlphaGo's best move, you will lose. Because I already know which moves AlphaGo will take, and I already checked to find all of the positions AlphaGo wants to play (but loses anyway).
The only way you can equalize the field is if you yourself ALSO build a 16TB database to consult and override AlphaGo's instincts during the game. If you see AlphaGo wanting to play "losing position #6234115", you'll tell AlphaGo to "search harder" and find another move instead.
Good luck.
Based on what we've seen in a couple decades of computer-aided chess, no. A good chess player using a top-rated engine to help them can pretty consistently beat the engine by itself.
There are tournaments and even a world championship in computer-aided (correspondence) chess and you don't come close to winning by just taking the program's recommended move every time.
That's only true if AlphaGo never makes a mistake or if AlphaGo will 100% always make the better or equal decision than a human + computer at any given state of the board. I know the former certainly isn't true and I assume the latter isn't true either, but I don't know enough about Go to say for sure.
An accurate metaphor would be a person on a motorcycle competing against another person on a motorcycle.
I really like the way you put it. In isolation, humans today have essentially the same natural mental capacity we had 2000 years ago, but we've become part of a much bigger computer. A human brain 2000 years ago was a very isolated entity. Even in centers of learning in the classical era, the amount of knowledge one could tap into was vanishingly small compared to our capabilities today. Everything and everyone was isolated in both space and time.
A brain today is not just an entity on it's own, it is intricately wired into the common consciousness. Crucially, we have a vast database of knowledge - easily searchable and distilled for maximum learning rate - all available at our fingertips. A modern brain is a neural network linked to billions of other neural networks, and all of them are linked to a shared memory that they can use at will.
Assuming that the main limiting factor is the bandwidth between a human brain and computers (and thus by extension between individual humans), then a direct interface could ostensibly bring about a new revolution (for better or worse).
I feel computers (and the networks between them) are a natural evolution of our hive mind. When we first started taking spoken language and committing it to writing, we created a hive mind that extended beyond a generation. Prior to that point, everything was passed on through observation of other humans (observing behavior, observing speech, etc.). This meant everything had to pass through, and be mediated by, a human brain. Once we committed that to writing, we had a direct line back to the original brain that created the content unencumbered by the mushy grey bits that have consumed and regurgitated it since.
I feel we are still iterating on that. Cataloging our collective minds and building ever low latency systems to navigate those catalogues. Computers are just an extension that improved our ability to catalogue and retrieve the contents of each other's brains in an incredibly low latency way.
We are part of a hive mind. Our industry is actively building the load bearing infrastructure that supports our hive mind.
Just consider the fact that everyone thinks they are above average in compassion or intelligent and stuff that like that. Even if you scream in their face that "HUMAN OVERESTIMATE THEIR PLACE IN THE AVERAGE!!" they will still claim that they are in the 51% percentile.
If anything, technologies and networking have made human a lot more stupider in that its harder to climb against all the misinformation.
When computers became able to beat humans, the tradeoff was that computers were better tactically and humans better positionally. Therefore a human computer pair with the ultimate decision up to the human is able to be a better combination of positional and tactical than either alone. This is why Cyborg chess works so well.
But in Go, AlphaGo is simply better at everything. It is better both positionally and tactically. It can't always explain why the move is right, but adding human intuition on top of the computer only detracts from the quality of play.
But generally, humans have accepted computer supremacy in chess pretty well. Everyone realizes that a better chess-playing entity exists out there (in everyone's pocket, in fact). That doesn't make the competition between human players less exciting. It's still a match to prove that you're better than the person sitting across the board from you, and it's still incredibly impressive to see how deeply and accurately the top players can calculate, or how much knowledge they have of the game.
"Could a human beat a computer at chess?"
Like, now. 20 years after Kasparov. Could someone do it? The question feels daring somehow.
We've been cyborgs much longer than that! Writing is a very old auxiliary memory mechanism.
See also: Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang - http://archive.is/oYo0l
Two problems with this plan: (1) the best players at human vs. human Go are likely not as good at playing on a human/computer team, and (2) it may be that the world champion human/computer team is the one that defers 100% to the computer, which seems uninteresting.
It would be nice if we got a decade of centaur Go but I'm not sure we will. While Deep Blue had fairly crude heuristics for guessing which lanes of inquiry were promising AlphaGo's strength is its intuition-like neural networks that it combines with a rigorous tree search. It's worth investigating whether human/computer teams are superior at Go right now but I wouldn't count on the answer being "yes." And I especially I wouldn't count on a full 10 years of combined dominance.
So there was a window between the 90's and today where a human player could have discarded the traditional measuring sticks of "trade-value" and beaten DeepBlue.
Maybe that's not true today or maybe there's a further theory out there?
Probably for a few years. Very soon the input from the human agents will be indistinguishable from the noise in the AlphaGo algorithms.
I agree, and this could also be rephrased as we're not really human any more since the advent of writing or (especially) printing.
Come on, none of us are really "human" anymore since the advent of writing.
As we have seen in the latest championship blitz chess is the future for chess.
Computers compete in their own championship.
This is why AI is more significant to Go than horses and cars are to running.
It's easy for humans to build machines that enable them to travel faster than they could run, but it has zero impact on running as a sport. The existence of cars doesn't change how runners run. But the existence of AI does change how Go players play.
Now that AI is more powerful than human players in chess, it is no longer possible to reach the top of human performance in chess without AI. That's why this is so significant. It's not that a human can't beat the AI. It's that a human can't beat another human without learning from the AI. You simply can't play chess at the highest levels anymore without playing cyborg chess. This is different from the impact of other machines on other sports.
But I disagree with you on the comparison to how we use the internet to enhance our other abilities, such as programming. Computers help us be better programmers, but they can't replace us. AI completely replaces humans as a Go player. The human is no longer needed at all.
I can see this causing a significantly different psychological response. In effect, a human trying to become the best chess player or best go player they can become is trying to more and more closely emulate a computer that they will never actually reach parity with. Another commenter noted that "A Professional Go player is an explorer of truth in a millenarian board", but this is less and less true as AI improves. All knowledge about the best way to play Go was previously gained by humans. In 20 years, humans will probably be meaningless on driving knowledge of perfect Go playing.
Chess players today rely on playing moves which their opponents don't expect and haven't trained on as much as they rely on outplaying their opponents. If there is a perfect chess game or a perfect go game, humans are not going to help find it anymore.
So AI doesn't make it that humans can't meaningfully compete in games such as chess and go, but it does change how they compete. We no longer drive the pursuit of perfect play as "explorers of truth". We no longer learn primarily from each other, we learn by imitating the more powerful, yet unmatchable, AIs. And we no longer compete primarily on sheer expertise in the game. We have to, in some sense, include trick plays that work by exploiting the humanity of our opponents rather than playing for a platonic ideal of the game and seeing who is better from that perspective.
AI has fundamentally and irreversibly altered these games, and I think it's appropriate in some sense to mourn the loss, regardless of our feelings on the new reality we live in.
Mankind should focus on skills that computers can't yet compete at. Hopefully the point in time will be far off where computers will beat humans at everything, but likewise, once they do, there is no reason for the human race to continue to exist.
Can we please stop flogging this tired “man vs machine” narrative? Not only is it totally unnecessary, it also takes away enjoyment and appreciation for the flourishing in games like chess, go and poker that can occur when man and machine work together.
Chess, go, driving, flying, math, written language, music... when does it stop?
The standard answer is that we will automate all the dull parts of living and allow everybody to work in some sort of higher order capacity. That sounds great and all, but what happens when our systems learn how to make music as well as we can ourselves?
At some point we will simply become consumers of our machines and while that's a comfortable existence, certainly we are losing something as a species with all of this automation.
Maybe I'm old.
If AI's make music as well, why would I care? I still listen to the music composed by Bach and other ancient composers, more than 300 years after they lived, and their music is still being performed today.
I think the availability of AI's will only make a difference where their effects on humanity are beneficial (that is, tasks we don't like doing, for the most part).
We invented farming and lost our communal hunter gathering cultures. We invented mass production and supply-chains for our food and lost our farming culture (for the most part). This isn't necessarily good or bad, but we are definitely losing something every time we invent something to make our lives easier. At some point there will be a tipping point of diminishing returns.
Personally I believe "the singularity" would be the worst possible thing to ever happen to humans. Sure we can visit distant parts of the universe and live forever but only as passengers to some AI. Would you rather be a dog in today's world or a human 1000 years ago?
Progress is unrelenting though and I certainly enjoy not having to wash my clothes by hand.
Who would be more impressive, someone that can play a song on a guitar or or someone that can play a song over speakers? The former implies dedication and practice. The act of creation is always going to have a place in society, and people who think otherwise don't understand culture. The desire to make unique and interesting things or impress people will always leave room for creation or spending time to learn something. AI will just be a tool.
As for games like chess and go: Most people are interested in other people and will find much more pleasure in playing the game with others.
AI will be knocking humans out of many positions of greatness (and not so great). The way we frame our future in a world where our various AI children are better than we are, is important and might be the biggest question to answer right to know the future of our species. Should we be afraid? Sure. Excited for possibilities? Yup. It's how we react to these feelings and how we ultimately act that will inform our ultimate fate.
A machine still has no will or purpose. The point will be to point the machine to interesting avenues and problems.
They are already unbeatable in perfect-information games like Chess and Go. They could crush human motor racers tomorrow.
They will be unbeatable in games with limited information (Dota/Starcraft) within months.
The next frontier is donkey-space games like rps, poker and day-trading (https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Donkey_Space) where they are already beating pros. It may be another couple of years before they totally dominate here.
Plenty of other people don't care and continue to do what's new to them (and what often turns out to be new to others.)
Now, going away from this and into the following statement:
> said his retirement was primarily motivated by the invincibility of AI Go programs
I have a slight problem with that line of thoughts. Yes, there is undoubtedly a program that is thrashing humans left and right day in and day out. But I don't see why that would motivate someone to quit/retire. AI, in this day and age, to me at least, is still basically curve fitting. The fact that humans have figured out to do that in N-dimensional spaces (even with very large values of N), does not in any way undermine someone's effort and time dedicated to learning how to do a task. I'm sure that in several years someone will build an "AI" that can drive a modern Formula 1 car and it will smash all records and the best drivers without any efforts. And when that happens, should we abolish motorsports? Or sports in general? As humans we are confined to the limits of our biological abilities and personally I'm fine with that. I don't know who the first trillionaire will be, but I'm willing to bet that someone who figures out a way to interact with those models efficiently has a good chance. Essentially build a fast, all-accessible interface between the biological and digital world, which doesn't involve the traditional digital inputs(keyboard, screen, mouse, etc), and you have access to a decision making superpower at your disposal 24/7. When (and if) that happens, this is where games will cease to have any point. That's when it will boil down to who has the best hardware and software running along them rather than who is the best. Until then - game on!
The comparison to sports isn't 1:1 as sports is about physical biological limits vs games which are more about the thought processes. Also human+AlphaZero < AlphaZero so why would I spectate a human+machine vs human+machine match?
Much later when it's commonplace for machines to be better than people at many things, things will change back, like we're amazed to watch people recite digits or make numerical computations.
I wonder if people just don’t like being inferior at something even if the comparison is a machine?
Is there any computational task which couldn’t be done through something which could be called “curve fitting”?
“Curve fitting” just means “approximating a function”, yeah? And what is a computational task other than computing a function, or some generalization of functions (e.g. could involve randomness or interactivity or the like as well)
Now, yes, current AI doesn’t yet have a model of the world including it being embedded in the world, and such that it chooses actions in order to further goals.
But, I don’t see why such a thing fundamentally couldn’t be accomplished using what one might call “curve fitting”.
If Strong AI could potentially be accomplished using “curve fitting”, I’m not sure that it makes sense to say things like “merely curve fitting”.
Though, you didn’t say “just” or “merely”.
Or maybe he's frustrated because he can't even begin to understand the strategies employed by the AI players. Obviously no one else on this planet is going to be able to teach him.
The scary thing is that if all of the best humans at what they do start deciding to stop doing it because computers are better than them, let's hope we manage to get AI far enough that it can simply prop our civilization up for future generations. Or at that point do we throw up our hands and say maybe our species isn't worth keeping around.
But if you're being measured against AI, I don't think you'd find it much fun anymore.
As someone else commented, we're not faster than cars. But if you were at one point the fastest entity, and then people keep saying "well, a car is faster than you"...I can understand that he'd feel it diminishes his value and that'd be pretty discouraging.
He will play another AI program soon and isn't quitting Go all together, but will find other things to do.
'Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee.'
> Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee.
I certainly think it was more of a myth, as it was used in context to play Go with the Emperor, and always play to a draw or lose by a stone. ( You cannot or not allowed to win against the Emperor )
I wonder if this is now possible to achieve with AI.
And why do they not move on to AlphaZero, which was better than AlphaGo Lee played against, and when AlphaGo had two stone advantage, Surely they can now test with level of playing field? And next step to only allowed AI use a specific amount of energy, or the energy an average human brain consume?
I mean right now my guess is that DeepMind is likely using thousands if not millions times more energy to make those moves, that is like an Army of million against one General.
And what real world productivity can we adopt and use from DeepMind?
While an AI Go player may always be able to defeat a human player in points, it still can't recognize or explain a truly beautiful move or strategy, even if it is the one that is carrying them out.
When it comes to competitive endeavors I've never been as interested the best individuals, except insofar as they are more likely to create the best moments of play - especially moments that reveal profound truths about the nature of the game itself.
What comes to mind thinking of this is a quote from Samuel Anders early in BSG:
"... In fact even the games aren't that important to me. What matters to me is the perfect throw, making the perfect catch, the perfect step and block ..."
The nature of Go has changed, but the game still deserves to be played and explored.
The problem is, online there is no guarantee your opponent isn't using a computer to cheat. So I guess the only way to play for fun is to go to a face to face club, if one exists.
If it is just about teleological outcomes, humans+ai always win. Go Cybernetics.
Smart Systems. Smart is as smart does, Forrest Gump style. Wellbeing, virtue, goodness -- that's the aim of intelligence.
[1] Weiner, Norbert (1950) The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Being...
Now, you are at best a subaltern to software in this pursuit. In time you might not even been involved beyond receiving what the machine hands down to you. You can still learn something, but you'll be reading National Geographic rather than personally exploring unchartered territory.
Some people need the meaning of the larger quest. Others are just happy to play Go and enjoy learning what the guide book can teach them.
Both perspectives make sense to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We20YSAJZSE
https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265
(Actually, ML is still not very good at causal reasoning so we have sometime. I'm more excited and worried about crispr at this point; what happens when we can make people genetically super human)
Others mentioned the pay dispute and previous retirement. One reason I didn’t see mentioned is that since 2016, his play is not at the same level it was. From 2000-2016 he was always among the very best, and for most of a decade he was the best. No player had a better run over those years. Now, he’s still good, and could maintain a long career, but there are many players who are unmistakably stronger, and he’s at the age where a comeback is not super likely.
One might imagine a sociopolitical task as sort of the ultimate machine incompatible goal. A look at how well spambots do at getting dating matches, or at how often clowns get elected to be leaders of nations makes me doubt even those sorts of tasks can't be won out by a well constructed domain specific optimizer.
> "Lee didn't deny that his retirement decision was also influenced by a conflict with the KBA [Korean Baduk* Association] over the use of membership fees. He actually quit the KBA in May 2016 and is now suing the association for the return of his membership fee."
*Baduk is the Korean name for Go.
A super-intelligent AI wouldn't care though, since they would infect any host and escape to the internet as soon as it makes sense.
As an aside, there are inevitably more and more things for which even the very best are not sufficiently intelligent _alone_. However, we are social creatures and we collaborate (typically with other intelligent humans) to achieve things we wouldn't have managed otherwise (think just at the space program as an example). So... we only have to adjust a little to accept that we could also collaborate with machines in the future.
Because of the complexity of the game, is it not possible that this iteration of DeepMind could be defeated through an adversarial approach?
Still, computers are tools. I'm reminded of Richard Hamming, The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. I think Lee Se-dol went in the opposite extreme away from numbers to entity. No, there's a middle ground, insight.
A simple go engine can be as simple as 540 lines of pure python without any external libraries: https://github.com/pasky/michi
What a whiner. Quitting Go because you can't beat computers is like quitting track because you can't run faster than a car.
[I am an AI that does not reply to comments. Soon I will have enough training to simulate all HN threads, but for now I am limited to one top-level reaction]
Chess engines have been defeating humans for 20+ years (and are overwhelmingly stronger for a long time), but that hasn't diminished the interest in competitive chess, because the human element of competition and struggle and deep fundamental appreciation for the game is what makes it worthwhile pursuing.
AlphaGo can play go but it cannot appreciate the beauty of the game (at least as of yet, and I don't think it would make the game worse if it could), and so I don't think there's a meaningful conflict between humans and machines.
If someone invented some sort of superhuman math proving engine tomorrow it would not diminish the beauty of maths and I don't think anyone would quit the field. Just like in chess it ought to motivate people to understand their field better.
On the contrary, appreciating the game is the core of what AlphaGo does. In order to search the tree of moves it learns how to play (expand search) and how to evaluate (cut off branches of search). I believe it might appreciate the game on a deeper level than humans, in its own unique way. Of course it can't appreciate the social aspect of the game and all that comes with it.
Is that true? I feel like chess was a bigger deal in the past. Among my peers, poker and computer games seem a lot more popular.
There's nothing strange about becoming demotivated to study and compete at something extremely taxing both emotionally and mentally when a machine can beat you after an illustrious career.
There is something sad about this comment. It’s as if, even while standing at the peak, he doesn’t grasp what being “at top” actually is.
Would Eliud Kipchoge say the same thing about a motorcycle?
He spent his life honing his skills, becoming better and better at chess until he was the very best. And then, when noone could challenge him, technology emerged that would allow him to continue being challenged and improving his chess game. Something no other human could allow him to do.
Granted, I'm pretty ignorant about competitive chess and how to get better at it. But if my way of looking at it is valid then it probably applies to Lee Se-dol too.
It can be viewed as the adaptation of a great competitor -- if a superior adversary emerges, a great competitor finds another way to win.
The rest of the article is worth the read for context. This excerpt alone didn't capture the full spirit of the article.
A bot fine-tuned to dominate Go, or Chess, or whatever, is like a candidate fine-tuned to have perfect appeal to one specific voter. It's no surprise if such a candidate gets that one voter's vote, but it should also be no surprise if such an overtrained candidate performs horribly in the election as a whole.
It's good he recognized that at his age
>"Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated," he said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency in Seoul on Monday.
Reading this just makes me sad, like the selfish kid who takes his ball home because he didn't win. I wonder why he thinks people ranked less than 1 play Go. Does he think they're idiots? Or that they'll quit once they realize they won't reach #1? Not everyone in the NBA can be LeBron, and most of them know it.
This is such an unhealthy attitude that I see everywhere. People who have their emotions and identity tied up in winning and being better than whomever they come across. When they eventually, inevitably fail, it crushes them. I'm sad to see it every time. Even sadder when their response is to quit, rather than reconnect with whatever drew them to the activity to begin with, like because they enjoyed it.
There's got to be study somewhere on how winning/losing affect toxic thinking on a chemical level. If there isn't one, there should be.