
Go master Cho wins best-of-three series against Japan-made AI - happy-go-lucky
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/11/24/national/go-master-cho-wins-best-three-series-japan-made-ai/#.WDdQUUnhXqA
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conanbatt
This news has flewn way under the radar in comparison to the previous Match.

Cho Chikun is a legendary player ,and was top of the world in the 70's. From
that era, along with Takemiya Masaki, he was one of the only ones that kept
playing and kept winning titles even in his old age.

The style of 70's players was artistic and not as sports-like as koreans were
when they rose in the 90's. They always showed a higher level of philosophy
and art in game, but it was ultimately crushed by the "machine-like" tactical
capacity of korean players. Cho chikun has very little chance to beat Lee
sedol. But he was confident on beating Zen, and he did something unspeakable
in the LeeSedol Matches: he came back from a losing game, from a machine that
looked that would never relent its edges.

As a retired semi-professional Go player that learnt by replaying games from
Cho Chikun, it is exciting to see the Japenese artistic and humane vision
dominate the computer over the Korean Tactical sports-minded way.

~~~
gcp
The news flies under the radar because for most people Go is now solved
(compare to what happened after Deep Blue's win). There's a small blemish in
that Ke Jie is still rated higher than AlphaGo. Perhaps they will rectify
that, perhaps not.

Cho Chikun had the large advantage over Lee Sedol that his opponent (Zen) and
similar programs (Crazy Stone, Leela) are simply available for him to practice
against and probe for weaknesses.

Then of course there's also a significant reduction in the speed of the
hardware.

Both of those matter a lot. I won't make a firm statement how relevant the
style argument is you mention, but really, don't underestimate those two.

~~~
msbarnett
> The news flies under the radar because for most people Go is now solved
> (compare to what happened after Deep Blue's win).

"Machines reaching a level of play that is consistently better than humans"
and "the game is solved" are two completely different statements and it isn't
particularly useful to conflate them.

We will likely _never_ be able to solve Go in the formal sense.

~~~
hkmurakami
The key though is "for most people". We live in a post-fact society, remember?
;)

~~~
rwallace
I don't think there is a factual disagreement here, just a terminology issue.
Mathematical jargon is not quite the same language as plain English. In the
former, 'solved' by default means you have found the mathematically perfect
solution. In the latter, 'solved' by default just means you have found a
solution good enough for practical purposes.

------
deegles
What bothered me about AlphaGo was the sheer amount of power that was
dedicated to training and running it vs. the relatively puny power budget a
human has.

i.e. "Lee Sedol used about 20 Watts of power to operate. By contrast, AlphaGo
runs on a whopping 1920 CPUs and another 280 GPUs for an estimated power
consumption of approximately 1 MW (200 W per CPU and 200 W per GPU). That’s
50,000 times as much power as the amount of power that Lee Sedol’s brain uses
and the two are not quite evenly matched but it is close enough to use for
comparison."[0]

I mean, sure, it's apples to oranges, but it feels like a pyrrhic victory to
have to use 1MW of computing power to beat a 20w brain.

I want there to be a series of AI vs. AI games where everyone has an equal
power budget for their AI. Everyone has to bring their own equipment and they
receive exactly X kwh from a calibrated power supply to train their model.
Training data could possibly also be standardized.

Each team would received a standardized power supply for the actual
competition (e.g 20w). There could be bonuses for using less energy for
training or during gameplay, or for faster response times between moves.

I believe this would drive innovation in building special purpose hardware,
more efficient training models, and so on.

[0] [http://jacquesmattheij.com/another-way-of-looking-at-lee-
sed...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/another-way-of-looking-at-lee-sedol-vs-
alphago)

~~~
rcthompson
> Everyone has to bring their own equipment and they receive exactly X kwh
> from a calibrated power supply to train their model

What's the advantage of this over simply providing every team with identical
hardware and equal computing time? It seems like providing a fixed power
supply would favor whoever can afford to buy more efficient computing
equipment.

~~~
deegles
Developing special purpose machine learning hardware is part of the goal. I
think of it like Formula 1, where the R&D eventually trickles down to consumer
hardware.

Also, there's no reason why you couldn't have different competition categories
where you're limited to using X dollars worth of time on a specific cloud
provider, for example.

------
Radim
"Meh" news because we had a higher profile match just recently: AlphaGo vs Lee
Sedol (both much stronger than DeepZen or Cho).

I mean, it's mildly interesting that DeepZen uses fewer resources (just ~40
CPUs and 4 GPU, compared to AlphaGo's ~2k CPU and ~200 GPUs, IIRC). But that's
relevant only to hardcore Go enthusiasts who would want to run such AIs on
their own hardware.

In contrast, the next interesting milestones in Go AI are:

* AI beating a team of cooperating top pros, say top-10 humans vs AI (easy)

* solving Go (hard)

* finding ways to translate insights gained from observing strong Go AI into real-life situations relevant outside of Go (my personal favourite; Go has that fascinating simple-meets-complex abstracting property [1])

[1] [https://rare-technologies.com/go_games_life/](https://rare-
technologies.com/go_games_life/)

~~~
adrianN
I think the next interesting milestone would be beating top rated humans using
commodity hardware. In chess for example, programs running on cell phone
processors have Elo rating around 2800. Using weaker hardware means that the
algorithms need to have more insight into the game and can't rely as much on
exploring the game tree.

------
partycoder
It depends on many things... such as the game data used to train it and the
hardware in which it ran, the time settings of the game, the implementation of
the algorithm, etc.

But so far commentators such as Ke Jie (higher rating than Lee Sedol), said
that Deep Zen Go's yose (end-game) is very weak compared to Alpha Go.

Another factor is that Cho Chikun had the advantage of studying more MCTS/DL
bot games. Today you can find MCTS/DL bots in servers such as KGS that you can
play against.

Cho Chikun had more clear expectations of the bot playing level. e.g: Lee
Sedol greatly underestimated Alpha Go initially, then he was in shock and did
not know what to expect. Your playing strategy can vary depending of strengths
and weaknesses of your opponent.

------
fiatjaf
What happened to chess enthusiasts when chess was "solved"?

~~~
olalonde
The best computers now consistently beat the best humans but "solved" has a
precise definition in game theory and it isn't completely solved under that
definition[0]. With regards to your question, I can't say for sure but my
impression is that interest in chess has declined a lot.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess)

~~~
espadrine
> _my impression is that interest in chess has declined a lot._

I don't think it has. Much like horseback riding has not made olympic races
obsolete, human competition remained fascinating. I for one very much followed
the rise of Magnus Carlsen.

~~~
olalonde
That was a poorly chosen example since interest in horseback riding has
declined a lot, at least in relative terms, compared to the pre car days.
Today, auto racing as a competitive sport is probably more popular too.

Personally, the fact that computers are better at chess than humans makes me
less interested in the game so I'm a bit biased.

~~~
dmoy
The argument is that the presence of horseback riding (and now race car
driving) doesn't necessarily diminish the popularity of foot races. Not that
horse racing is less popular now (though that my be, simply because it's no
longer anyone's preferred method of transportation...)

~~~
olalonde
Ah, I missed that. It's hard to say with certainty whether horseback riding
diminished the popularity of foot races since it happened such a long time ago
and at a time where probably neither was considered a sport or entertainment.

I do think that technological advances in general affect the appeal of certain
games and sports by rendering them less mysterious or by bringing them further
from a real world activity/situation.

Of course, I'm talking about relative, not absolute, popularity. Chess and
horseback riding will remain popular for a long, long time.

------
brilliantcode
> Cho won a close game 1,[28] lost game 2 when his invasion into enemy
> territory was killed,[29] and won game 3. Zen uses neural network techniques
> similar to AlphaGo,[30] however ran on more modest hardware during the
> match.

not sure if suggests any comparison between AlphaGo and Zen. I'd like to see
Cho play against AlphaGo.

~~~
iopq
Cho Chikun would not stand a chance against AlphaGo. AlphaGo has shown itself
to be stronger than Lee Sedol, who is much stronger than Cho.

------
bluetwo
OK, can't we just have Zen and AlphaGo play each other?

~~~
gcp
What would the upsides of such a match be for AlphaGo?

How many matches with other computers did Deep Blue play after its victory
over Kasparov? (zero)

How many world championships did Deep Blue win? (zero, it played one in 1995
and lost to Fritz)

How many people tought Deep Blue was the strongest computer in the world in
1996? (All of them, because IBM said so and conveniently forgot about the lost
world championship)

Google has already said AlphaGo is much stronger than other programs. There's
no point in playing a match then, is there?

~~~
bluetwo
Errrrrr.... It would shut up Zen go or prove them right? That seems like a
reason.

