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Comment by _acco | Hacker News Reader

It's an invitation to define (or re-define) creativity, my friend :)

If it seems ridiculous to you, that's a good signal that you'd get a lot out of digging into philosophy of mind.

Where do our thoughts come from? Creativity? Is it so preposterous that these too arise from probabilistic electrical storms - but in wet matter as opposed to hard?

Where thoughts come from may be too complex for us to model now, maybe ever. But if you look deep enough, I think you'll find at heart deterministic processes driven by networks that were trained through nature + nurture.

Maybe creativity is less ethereal than we perceive. Maybe it would benefit us to start considering how non-sentient intelligence can achieve it.

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I am not making, and do not explicitly agree with, the statement that only human brains are imbued with 'creativity'. However, the core of the alphaGo algorithm is just a monte-carlo tree search of the game initially populated with prior estimates of the value of each game state(with the generation of the prior value estimates being carried out by the DNN). I see no space in this simplistic statistical game analysis for concepts such as creativity. The move in question was chosen because it's prior value estimate by alphaGo was favorable and upon further analysis was concluded to be the most likely to result in a game victory relative to all other available moves. If alphaGo was only trained on human matches and subsequently was able to discover moves that drastically deviate from typical human strategies, I would be more open to labeling it as creative. However, most of alphaGo's training is carried out against itself, it's entirely possible that alphaGo has made this particular(or similar) move many times against itself during training.

Much of human creativity is likely linked to some sort of Bayesian analysis, but it also can happen based on limited sample sets and unseen situations. As you point out, the Alpha Go likely just saw that scenario out of millions of random scenarios never explored by humans before. Given the enormous compute resources used, it's possible AlphaGo has made more Go moves than all of humanity ever combined.

Reminds me of a quip about Richard Feynman that he'd spend many hours honing a new way of doing a physics problem, but carefully present it as if he just did it off handed. So we just need to link human brains with cybernetic implants to compete. ;)

Perhaps in 100-200 years, some neuroscientist will make the same remark about a painter’s brain — “it’s just math, I can model it!”

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