
Another Way of Looking at Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo - janvdberg
http://jacquesmattheij.com/another-way-of-looking-at-lee-sedol-vs-alphago
======
visarga
Shifting goalposts. And humans cost much more energy than the watts contained
in their food. Humans take 20 years to "train" and need lots of water,
electricity, food, clothes, transportation and teaching time.

If they were to use only the policy net part of AlphaGo they would need a few
milliseconds per move and only one computer to run it, achieving the level of
1p. Also, if DeepMind used specialized Go hardware maybe they could reduce the
power usage a lot, but they didn't optimize for that.

For example, it would be interesting to calculate how much power is used in
image recognition, man vs machine. The brain uses 20-40W and a cell phone only
5W, and we know cell phones can do image recognition, so, probably the
computer uses less than the human given that human reaction time is 200ms and
the computer could classify much more than 5 images per second, so it uses
less time and consequently less energy per image.

~~~
baddox
I mean, you could keep counting all the energy used in the causal chain as far
back as you want. After all, AlphaGo was created by humans whose brains used a
heck of a lot of energy.

I still think that looking at _marginal_ energy cost while playing the game is
an interesting approach.

~~~
visarga
AlphaGo is only two years old and is one of a handful of computer AI programs,
but humans have had millions of years of evolution. So it's not fair to
compare. Computers have evolved too, maybe even more dramatically than
biological life, to lower and lower levels of power usage.

In Chess no top player can beat his/her cell phone. This milestone will be
eventually achieved in Go too.

------
roel_v
Why do we count only the amount of energy the human uses during the match?
After the match we can turn the machine off, making it use no energy. Humans
need to spend 50+% of their time doing stuff that isn't even related to the
activities we're measuring (eat, sleep, do laundry, drink wine with friends),
and 99% of the rest on 'training'.

I fail to see why energy-parity comparisons are 'more fair' or 'better'. We
don't have soccer matches for people who eat nothing but two sandwiches a day,
do we? Has a marathon winner cheated if he ate a few bananas during the race
and the runner up hasn't? Of course not (well, 'of course' to me, it seems
that the OP might disagree?).

I guess we could move on to comparing sporting wins by people who used
steroids, but that would just stray from the actual point.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, motor vehicle races are generally broken up by how much horsepower the
car has, right? Or boxing matches by weight class?

~~~
roel_v
Interesting angle that I hadn't considered.

That said, I don't think it's the same. Vehicles and fighters are classified
in various ways (power/weight, but also experience, e.g. pro and amateur
classes) because otherwise the competition becomes 'who has the best
engineering team' and not 'who drives best'; or 'who has most fighting skills'
and not 'who can overpower his opponent through sheer force/mass'. It's purely
to keep it interesting and/or exciting.

In this case, I interpreted the argument made in the OP as 'it only becomes an
achievement when the computer constrains itself to the boundaries the human
has by its nature'. I don't see the point of that. An F1 car is unarguably
faster than 50cc kart. If we talk about 'who can drive the fastest', it
doesn't make sense to say 'it's not a 'fair' comparison'. It is, and the F1
car is faster, period.

The nature of the past match was 'who is the best Go player, no holds barred'.
Call it the UFC 1 of Go. Back in 1994 in UFC 1 there were no weight classes,
no restrictions on techniques - the question was 'who is the best fighter'.
It's not like after that event the sumo guy said 'yeah well I can't move as
fast because I'm 200kg, so we'll only know who is the best fighter after a jiu
jitsu guy fights me but doesn't move faster than I do'.

I guess there is more nuance to the debate than I originally thought. I still
think it doesn't make sense to impose artificial limits. We might have
tournaments for humans and tournaments for machines in the future, just like
we have nascar and F1. But there is no mistake who is the best player.

~~~
surfaceTensi0n
>I interpreted the argument made in the OP as 'it only becomes an achievement
when the computer constrains itself to the boundaries the human has by its
nature'

I don't think this is a particularly accurate interpretation considering the
author says:

>Now, not to diminish the achievement of the AlphaGo team, what they have done
is nothing short of incredible

I think a more charitable interpretation can be found by looking at the
closing paragraph which starts with this line:

>So now the interesting question (to me at least) is: How long before a
computer will beat the human Go world champion using no more power than the
human.

------
mcherm
There are VERY few situations where I care even remotely how energy efficient
someone's thinking is. The benefits of better thinking are nearly always far
more valuable than the energy inputs. We are frequently limited by the fact
that no more intelligence can be applied to the problem no matter what we do.
In many other cases we are limited by cost -- we would happily hire a team of
three planners or one expensive genius, whichever was smart enough to lead our
project at the cheaper price. But even in extreme cases like manned
spaceflight, I've never heard of hiring someone dumber because at least they
ate less.

~~~
ekianjo
That's not the point at all. The point is that if you decide tomorrow to run
thousands of AIs like AlphaGo to replace humans to do several stuff, does that
scale well? Well, if it consumes as much power as AlphaGo, it certainly does
not. The point about having something running on low watts is critical for
scalability in the longer term, because no matter how you look at it, energy
production is finite (you can increase it over time but there are clear limits
anyway).

~~~
visarga
Machine learning is compatible with low energy applications. There is a body
of research in slimming down heavy neural nets to run on cell phones with very
little accuracy loss. AlphaGo uses so much power because it additionally uses
a brute force approach to improve its results.

------
ricraz
I'm not sure why having a "fair" competition matters. The point of
technological progress is to get better outcomes, not to get better outcomes
using massively constrained hardware. Of course the latter is useful, but it's
totally arbitrary to just pick energy usage as the one constraint to put on
computers, there are hundreds of other ways in which they're advantaged. The
important thing is that it can be done at all.

~~~
emodendroket
I mean, it's cool now but not really practical to set up in your home, for
instance.

------
Vraxx
My main complaint with this line of thought is this. It is claimed that it is
not fair due to energy usage comparisons, but if you asked people before
AlphaGo if it was a "fair" competition to pit a Go AI versus a world class
professional, the answer would be hilariously no, because the world class
professional would destroy the AI. I imagine telling them that you'll use more
energy than them wouldn't change the consensus either. But now that a computer
using so much energy _did_ beat a world class professional, now this same
scenario is framed as unfair for the professional.

There's plenty of back and forth arguments that can be made as to whether the
energy argument is a true test of fairness, but I don't think it matters if
it's a good yardstick for fairness or not. It was an amazing feat to create an
AI of _any_ size that could beat a professional.

~~~
mikeash
The post starts with an analogy of a race between a runner and a race car. It
says we'd call this unfair because the two are clearly not comparable.

But I think it gets the reasons wrong. It says we'd call it unfair because the
race car uses so much more energy. I think we'd call it unfair because the
outcome is such a foregone conclusion. We know the race car is going to be
_way_ faster, so the race is pointless. It's a foregone conclusion, so why
even bother unless you do something to make it more even?

Go back to the very early days of automobiles, when they were so slow that a
human runner would be faster. Then a new one comes along that can beat a
human. The first car faster than a person!

Would you be amazed that machine has beaten man? Or would you say that it
somehow doesn't count, because machine used more fuel than man? I'm _pretty
sure_ most people would not go for the second one.

------
wheresmypasswd
The AlphaGo team tweeted that the single node version wins 25% of the time
against the cluster version.

The bulk of the compute is in training the model... I would bet that a cell
phone AlphaGo is <200 ELO (or whatever passes in the Go world) weaker than the
massively distributed version--good enough to be competitive with Lee Sedol.

~~~
andrepd
It doesn't really matter what you bet. I want to see a Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo on
a single consumer chip before I draw any conclusions.

~~~
kotach
If it works for chess, it'll work for Go. Chess has lots of games that you can
learn from, Komodo wins any grandmaster or draws.

The problem with Go was lack of evaluation function that would guide the
policy. So it had to be learned simultaneously.

You can leave AlphaGo to play a billion games and then learn a policy that
requires little to no search but has almost perfect evaluation (local
optimality of minimizing future regret).

Same positional play is exhibited by Komodo, and it requires not that much of
depth searching, while currently AlphaGo rolls out a whole game for every
move.

------
ajuc
Still other way of looking at this - could the whole humanity playing in one
team win against AlphaGo?

If no - computers still win because they scale better (play better as a team).

~~~
pmontra
IMHO the whole humanity won't contribute much to the challenge. You take the
best 5 pros and that's pretty much the best team you can pit against the AI.
Ten pros would probably need too much time to discuss and coordinate. A
striking analogy with software dev teams :-)

~~~
ajuc
That's the point - humans don't scale, and 1 person vs energetic equivalent
computer is arbitrary (and human-prefering) level of comparison.

------
chronial
> In the one corner: Human, all of 175 pounds of extremely well trained
> runner. And in the other corner, a Formula 1 racecar with a remote control
> running down a straight track. > > Nonsense, you’d say, that’s not a fair
> comparison

No, I (and I think most sensible people) would say that's pointless – we know
who's going to win. If you have a sufficiently smooth surface or it's worth
creating one, cars are way better at their specific task than humans are.
Everybody knows that and nobody uses humans for transportation or walks when
they care about getting there fast.

Why is everybody so scared that computers might now “be better” than humans?

~~~
jacquesm
I'm not scared at all. I'm just pointing out that there is _another_ hurdle
that would be a major achievement to cross, without belittling at all what it
took to achieve this victory. It is one of the most interesting results for
many years simply because almost all the experts agreed this was _at least_ a
decade away.

~~~
chillacy
> without belittling at all what it took to achieve this victory

That's not really what it comes across as. Most posts like that reek of moving
the goalpost.

Also the efficiency goalpost is probably the easier problem. Advancement in
processor designs, microarchitecture, and basic code optimization will get us
there, not necessarily changing the techniques of AlphaGo.

* 60 years ago ENIAC was room-sized and slow, now salesmen hand out branded solar calculators for free * As the article mentioned, deepblue was a massive computer with custom hardware, now your <1W phone can run stockfish. The achievement wasn't by the chess team, it was by Intel, ARM, compiler developers, etc.

------
robbiemitchell
I don't understand why a Joule-for-Joule "fair" competition will seem like a
more important achievement. Computers can trade efficiency for raw
performance, humans can't -- it's an unfair advantage. How the AlphaGo team
balances those two over time will change, but for now I'm delighted to see
what happens when they optimize for something that is beyond human potential.

~~~
chillacy
Doubling alphaGo's compute will improve Go performance (up to a limit)
Doubling a human's food intake will only lead to cardiac issues ;)

------
placebo
I find people using various tricks to somehow console themselves of the fact
that a machine beat a human to be quite funny.

What is it exactly that they're trying to protect? Perhaps at the core is a
fear that if someone or some thing does something better than me than I'm not
worth as much, or more generally, if "they" (the machines) do things better
than "us" then we're not worth as much, and what wouldn't we do to feel
worthy... but I feel this whole nonsense stems from a belief that anything in
existence could really be unworthy. I remember a short passage, from one of
Raymond Smullyan's books noting two different responses from humans the day it
is discovered that it is possible to make machines that are indistinguishable
from humans. The first says glumly: "So, we are just machines?" The other says
with joy: "I didn't know machines could be so wonderful". It's not a contest
of worthiness - it's reality beautifully playing out and there are no unworthy
players.

~~~
jacquesm
> I find people using various tricks to somehow console themselves of the fact
> that a machine beat a human to be quite funny.

I find it quite funny that you'd take what I wrote and that you'd manage to
wrangle from it that we need to be consoled. I simply observed that there is
_another_ challenge, one that in chess has since the first computer beat a
world champion been more than met and that in Go there is still some distance
left to cover.

Put another way, if the size and energy consumption would not matter do you
think that there would have been improvement in the Chess programs post the
point where they could beat any chess player in the world? Clearly the Chess
programming community thought otherwise and we've seen a _major_ improvement
in algorithms and this resulted in a huge decrease in the required computing
horsepower. That's _smarter_ programming, not using larger computers to
achieve the win through brute force and to me - feel free to disagree - that's
an interesting prospect.

~~~
placebo
Ok, I made an unnecessary leap from knowing that many people do feel
threatened by the increasing problem solving abilities of computers to
assuming you are one of them. so I stand corrected, and in light of your
response understand that my sermon was misplaced in this context.

I don't disagree with you at all. In fact, I think probably we're headed for
the same improvements over time with machines playing Go as was with machines
playing Chess. I think that in addition to better algorithms, Chess had the
advantage of having Moore's law being in full swing over these years, which
will probably slow down, but there's always something new and unexpected
coming up, so beyond multiple processors and GPU's with lower energy
consumption I'm sure there will be even further improvements in the machine
learning methods and other things that I can't yet imagine.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm really hoping for a software improvement rather than a hardware one, in
reality it will likely be a combination of both.

------
abecedarius
Take the post's estimate at face value: 1 MW to run AlphaGo. Residential
electricity costs on the order of $0.10/kWhr, or $10/hour for 1 MW. If the
same machine were a better programmer than you, would you say "pshaw, come
back when it beats me at power parity"? OK, the total cost of operation will
be substantially higher (though it probably runs on cheaper electricity),
maybe even approaching your total cost to your employer.

This does bring up a point I've wondered about: why haven't we yet found a
productive way to spend lots of computing power on making us better
programmers? Usually the most cycles are spent on compiling and on test runs,
costing only a tiny fraction of our hourly rates. (Maybe that compute budget
for software development looks at least somewhat different at Google and some
other places.)

~~~
jacquesm
$10 will buy you 100KWh, not 1MWh, you're off by a factor of 10.

> why haven't we yet found a productive way to spend lots of computing power
> on making us better programmers? Usually the most cycles are spent on
> compiling and on test runs, costing only a tiny fraction of our hourly
> rates.

The Go language (ironically) addresses some of this by putting programmer
productivity very high up in their feature list by focusing on compiler speed
to the point where some of the differences between compiled and interpreted
languages disappear.

~~~
abecedarius
Oops, thanks for the correction. OTOH zamalek elsewhere in these comments
thinks 1MW is a considerable overestimate.

~~~
jacquesm
The 1MW figure was based on what I could get out of the available articles, if
anybody has a better estimate backed with data then I'd be more than happy to
update the article but if it's off by a factor of 2 or so then that's good
enough for 'government work'. I'd still update the article but the conclusion
would not be much different.

The GPUs alone could consume that much power depending on the model but it's
quite hard to find hard data on what went into the making of AlphaGo on the
hardware side.

~~~
abecedarius
Geoff Hinton at [http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/the-meaning-of-
alphag...](http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/the-meaning-of-alphago-the-
ai-program-that-beat-a-go-champ/) said "I wouldn’t be surprised if it was
using hundreds of kilowatts", in the same range as the other estimate I
mentioned above (a couple hundred). I don't know either.

------
wodenokoto
Deep blue using ~900 watts vs AlphaGo ~1.000.000 watts doesn't sound right.

~~~
zamalek
The assumption is 200W per CPU and 200W per GPU. 1920 × 200 + 200 × 280 =
440kW. That's 1.76MWh for the entire match.

~~~
MagnumOpus
The assumption is very obviously wrong, by as much as an order of magnitude.

The TDP of the 24 core Xeon systems that were most likely used is 6.8W per
core.

~~~
zamalek
Let's assume that he actually meant 200W per blade, so:

    
    
        (1920core × 200W/machine ÷ 24core/machine + 200gpu × 280W/gpu) × 4h = 288kWh
    

The original is still somewhat acceptable as a Fermi estimation and argument,
as AlphaGo still uses more energy (3600 times more) with this conservative
estimate.

------
Strom
There seems to be a lack of basic fact checking in this post.

 _In the world of Chess it took until 1996 before a computer won against the
then reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov in a series of 6 matches._

1) His name is Garry Kasparov

2) Kasparov won the 1996 series against Deep Blue 4-2, it was in 1997 that
Kasparov lost 2.5-3.5

------
Ulti
This isn't a better view though. The number of Watts is not important. Biology
is efficient in energy use, so what? If you tax a human brain it doesn't
especially consume vast amounts more energy. I don't work up a sweat thinking.
What's more interesting is if the computational "power" has parity. Deep Blue
wasn't as computationally powerful as a human brain. It was specialised which
is why it's not as interesting a victory as AlphaGo which is based on a more
general principal.

~~~
jacquesm
> Biology is efficient in energy use, so what?

That's a very bold statement to make coming from the perspective of an
industry that does just about everything it can to save energy. Better
programming means lower energy consumption, to achieve a win like this on 1%
of the energy budget would be a major game changer (no pun intended).

AlphaGo is still using brute force quite a bit, the stage is set for a much
improved batch of software that will focus less on brute force as a main
strategy.

------
sguwwochqbib
I love how many of the comments here are along the lines of:

"yes Lee Sedol only consumes 20-40W during a game, but you have to sum all the
energy consumed to create him, and the power he consumes when he's not playing
etc" but then they fail to apply the same logic to computers

Sum all the energy required to create computers over the past however many 50+
years then let's see if it's the case that computers made by evolved computers
are any more efficient than their evolved creators

~~~
aab0
The money spent on CPU/GPU manufacturing improvement is a sunk cost and more
than paid for itself along the way in economics benefits; the cost of the
cluster that beat him is already around what he was paid for this one set of
matches.

In contrast, making a Lee Sedol will never be cheaper, and he lacks all of the
other myriad advantages of software, like being instantly clonable and
continuously improvable. You will never be able to mash up Shusaku and Sedol
to see what they do, train them against each other for subjective millennia,
examine the internals of their position evaluation, increase or decrease the
sizes of their brains, compress them into much smaller neural nets, combine
with other algorithms like MCTS, etc. Energy consumption is among the least
important aspects of AI at the moment. We are not in a situation where we know
how to make a feasible human-level AI but because electricity costs 10
cents/kwh no one can run, but they could if electricity cost 5 cents/kwh...

~~~
sguwwochqbib
Also, did I say that disagreed with AI ? No. I didn't. I'm all in favour of AI
and I expect one day that it will be comparable in terms of energy
consumption, generality and other measures we could invent. But for now,
amazing though it is, this is not such a huge achievement as it's been made-
out to be.

------
nkurz
_we are going to measure who is fastest. In the one corner: Human, all of 175
pounds of extremely well trained runner. And in the other corner, a Formula 1
racecar with a remote control running down a straight track._

Over what distance? I think it's generally accepted that a human sprinter is
faster than the car if the race is short enough.

I can't find an example of human vs F1, but here's a fast sprinter vs a
standard car:
[http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/news/a21802/olympic-...](http://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/news/a21802/olympic-
sprinter-out-accelerates-a-bmw-320d-34791/)

And here's a slow sprinter versus a much faster Indy car:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seNRu5JjpDM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seNRu5JjpDM)

The obvious comparison would be to a "blitz game" in Go, where I think that
humans still have the advantage. Would a shorter (or longer) time be somehow
inherently "fairer"?

------
verytrivial
This is exactly the question I was asking myself this morning! I find the
parallels to robotics interesting too: whenever another creepy beast lurches
out of Boston Dynamics I wonder how such machines will function 50 or 100 year
in the future when the world is operating under a different energy cost
equation, when the fruits of millions of years of fossil fuel deposit have
been spanked.

Edit: I see lots of "no fair!" comments here. I think people are failing to
grasp how supremely efficient biological systems are at dealing with exactly
the sort of messy/noisy/lossy reasoning required for real-world problem
solving, the sort of reasoning I see linked (incorrectly IMHO) by various
media to the advancement demonstrated by this hyper-specialized Go playing
machine.

Edit2: (I removed that "little to show for it" bit before I saw your comment
because it was leading to a digression I realised I would need to defend which
seemed unwarranted in this context. Sorry about that!)

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _with little to show for it._

Those fossil fuels allowed us to rapidly bootstrap ourselves through the
industrial revolution, and to get to the point where renewable and carbon-
neutral energy isn't just feasible, but already being used in many places.

I'd say we've got quite a bit to show for it.

~~~
jacquesm
And now we're telling the rest of the world they should focus on
sustainability and the environment. The hypocrisy is quite incredible at
times.

~~~
Vraxx
It is hypocritical, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. That's also
not to say it isn't necessarily unfair. I tend to see it like progression in a
game's tech tree, in some sense the prior steps (oil) were needed to get to a
point where we can actually create energy in a clean and renewable way. In the
future, there will likely be a tipping point where the energy created from
clean and renewable sources can be used to help create new sources, but it
likely wouldn't have been possible without the oil stepping stone. In an ideal
and non-hypocritical scenario, the advancements in energy production would be
shared to avoid the dirty oil intermediary step, but while there is still
scarcity and separate national entities, there will still be hoarding and
greed.

A great implementation of this is type of thinking is Morocco's solar plant in
the Sahara [0]. Though I don't think this would have happened if it wasn't
also thought to be a good investment, and urging a bad investment that you're
not willing to participate in would definitely be hypocritical.

[0]:[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/02/04/465568055/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/02/04/465568055/morocco-unveils-a-massive-solar-power-plant-in-the-
sahara)

------
johanneskanybal
Well what an irrelevant way of looking at it.

~~~
tommynicholas
Agreed. The amount of energy it takes to do this will soon fit in my phone
easily without having an impact on my battery life (as is the case with
chess).

~~~
emodendroket
Maybe, depending on how you define "soon."

~~~
tommynicholas
True!

------
mbubb
Another comparison would be how would the Formula 1 car do in terms of
sourcing its own energy to keep going. Humans - in our primitive state were
adapted for 'persistence hunting' \- we ran in packs and drove animals into
hyperthermia.

The Formula 1 car would do quite well for the first few hundred miles. But you
would eventually get an Aesopian 'tortoise and hare' effect.

In the real world the OP's point is a good one. Lee SeDol could outlast
AlphaGo by making it use too much in the way of resources (energy, human work,
maintenance) untill he could get close enough to fell the beast with a stone
arrow or hardened wood spear...

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

~~~
mikeash
F1 cars are good at causing humans to tend to their needs, though! Much better
than most humans. The average F1 car gets far more resources than, for
example, I do.

Here's a fun idea. Chess is thoroughly lost to the computers at this point,
but what if we add in an element that would give the humans an advantage?
There's a real actual sport called Chess boxing. The competitors spend three
minutes playing chess, then three minutes pounding the crap out of each other,
alternating back and forth. Let's see how well a modern computer can do at
_this_ game!

~~~
dagw
I'd probably bet on this:
[https://www.robots.com/images/R-2000ia.JPG](https://www.robots.com/images/R-2000ia.JPG)
vs. a human, especially since all it has to do is not get knocked out.

~~~
mikeash
I'm sure that without substantial modification that would violate some of the
rules of the game. Chess boxing also has weight classes, so while it might be
able to win a heavyweight match, other weight classes would be much more
interesting.

To keep things fair, I think we should require the computer to view and
manipulate the physical chess board and pieces. None of this nonsense of
feeding it moves through a keyboard and taking instructions off a screen.

~~~
chillacy
Why create a bunch of rules to keep things fair? Man vs machine is never going
to be fair once we have the machine to do it. Before deep blue or alphaGo, yea
it'll be a fun event. Once the machine exists, we check off another box in the
list of things that machines can now do, and we move on with our lives.

Though on the topic of the movement aspect of boxing, machines are still
pretty bad at keeping their balance and moving around the world, even without
limitations.

~~~
mikeash
Don't create new rules, just keep existing ones. The rules I found on
worldchessboxing.com (every time I see the phrase "chess boxing" it makes me
laugh) say that the chess clock must be pressed with the same hand that moves
the piece, so apparently the computer is going to need hands (well, one hand).
They also say that it's the player's responsibility to press their own clock
between moves, so that rules out any outside help for moving pieces.

I note that the players are allowed to bring water to the chess table. I'm not
sure if there's a rule _against_ pouring it on your opponent. The computer
might need to take this into account.

~~~
chillacy
I think a <200lb bipedal 2-arm robot which could box would be a marvel to see,
but if there aren't any rules which say how many arms and legs the combatant
has to have, the robot is gonna have wheels, most of its mass in the lower
body so as to make it un-topplable, be made of some lightweight metal, and
have an arm that plays chess and a boxing glove on an actuator that can break
concrete.

And on the point of existing rules, the existing rules aren't enough for this
type of competition. First of all the weight class: are robots men or women?
It says age 17+, how does that affect the robot? There's no rule against
pouring water on the robot, but there also isn't a rule against releasing
nerve gas. My robot is a pourous metal box with a canister of gas which
renders everyone unconscious, do I win by K/O?

Also, they already have battle robots, and they look nothing like conventional
humans (one common design is a flat panel that slides under the opponent and
jettisons them)

As for reaction speed of man (100+ms vs machine), I'll just link this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY)

~~~
mikeash
> nerve gas

This tournament is sounding better and better all the time!

------
ikeboy
You could also look at cost. How much would it cost to rent the alphago
processing power from EC2, and how much does it cost to get a top player to
agree to play you? (The actual match here doesn't count because of publicity,
but I imagine general costs should be easily calculated.)

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fuzzythinker
Another way is by weight. Kind of like weight classes in boxing matches. Let
Google cram all its hardware it can in the same weight as its opponent,
including the batteries that will last for the duration of the match
(actually, a longer match since the current match duration seems to be in
AlphaGo's favor).

Sure, it will probably still win in this setup say in a year or so, but it
will provide a much closer match if done within the next few months.

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andrepd
Another way of looking at this is that Lee Sedol wasn't playing against one
machine, but against a team of thousands of players.

~~~
Vraxx
Do you think a thousand amateurs working together could be Lee Sedol? I'm
inclined to believe that having 1000 of them would only make an impossible
feat harder. Strategy quality doesn't, in fact, scale with the number of
individual actors creating the strategy.

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iofj
Big problem in this way of looking at this: energy is measured in Joules, not
in Watts.

So this is not a fair comparison. Yes Lee was pretty cheap energy-wise to
"run" during the game itself, but needed 150W or so constantly for 33 years to
get trained to be as good as he is (brain is cheap, but obviously you have to
keep the body alive too). Plus the massive support structure needed to raise
him, teach him, get him interested in Go, provide opponents to train against.
As you can't have a grandmaster. You need 10 grandmasters, 1000 really good
players, 1000000 good players, and so on to train someone to get to this
level.

AlphaGo needed 1MW, probably about the same for training. If AlphaGo got
trained in about a week, I bet the energy difference would favor AlphaGo,
depending on what you count you could make AlphaGo or Lee Sedol win the
comparison, so really, it's a tossup.

And let's compare it to chess. Deep Blue used probably a similar amount of
power in it's entire lifetime as Gary Kasparov will need for his lifetime.
Maybe a factor 10 difference, but no more. However, a current chess computer
uses less than a billionth the amount of power for learning & playing chess
than Gary Kasparov needs to live and learn to play chess at his level.

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faitswulff
This is a great observation. It makes me curious as to what about the human
brain allows it to do calculations so efficiently?

~~~
chronial
The human brain is in this situation much closer to an ASIC than a CPU. An
average human can't play go on this level of skill – you need to use 20 years
to turn your brain into the right kind of ASIC to play go.

Also comparing the human brain and cpus in general, it should be noted that we
are just good at different things. When it comes to basic arithmetic, human
brains are much less energy-efficient than cpus.

~~~
chongli
Calling a human brain an ASIC seems ridiculous to me. Lee Sedol, in addition
to being a marvellous Go player, is also a typical human being. He can speak a
language, read and write, probably drive a car, take care of his wife and
child. AlphaGo is incapable of all those things. If you ask me, it's closer to
an ASIC than a human is.

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collyw
Interesting way to look at it, but my guess is that a chess program on your
average mobile phone could beat your average person (i.e. no professional) at
chess.

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KnightOfWords
Good point, power consumption is often overlooked by proponents of AI.

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benologist
What is the point of only using as much energy as a human to beat a human when
we are transitioning to renewable energy sources that are essentially
infinite?

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SubiculumCode
What about the energy it takes to grow one human?

~~~
sguwwochqbib
what about the energy it takes to make the chips ?

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guilhas
The machine had the time to train against humans. But did Lee Sedol had the
opportunity to train against the Algorithm?

~~~
jbergens
It's not simply an algorithm. It as learning computer. It remembers and learns
from previous matches. He can probably play more matches against AlphaGo if he
wants to but the computer will keep getting better and probably faster than he
is.

------
Houshalter
I've seen a lot of "AI denial" and moving goalposts in the discussions about
AlphGo. Go was, for the longest time, a huge milestone for AI research. And
now that it's finally succeeded, there's a lot of discussion about how it's
not that significant.

But this article takes the cake for moving goalposts. It declares that the Go
match wasn't _fair_ because AlphaGo got to use far more energy than Sedol.

On the surface this claim is kind of absurd. You could give Sedol an
electrical outlet with as much power as he wants. It wouldn't help at all.
Humans can't make their brains bigger, or use more power, _even if they want
to_. Which is one advantage the AI has. And that's totally fair.

But beyond that, until now no has really cared about the energy usage of AIs.
The fact an AI could even do a task on the level of a human was incredible,
regardless how much energy was required. The Energy usage isn't important in
this domain. It's board game playing. It's shifting goalposts to goals that
don't even matter!

But there is a valid reason to care about energy usage. It does cost money to
run AlphaGo, and in other domains that could matter a lot. But even from the
economic perspective, it's not accurate. I bet the food budget of a human is
way more than the electricity budget of AlphaGo.

For this economic estimate, you need to factor in more than just energy. A
human takes 20 years to mature. AlphaGo took less than a week to get good, and
a few months to be the best. And over the human's life, they will use lots of
energy and food.

Humans are _extremely expensive_ , as can be estimated just from wages. If it
requires only a rack of GPUs to replace an expert human, it may very well be
worth it economically.

Additionally, AlphaGo _doesn 't_ require a huge distributed network of GPUs.
That improves it's performance only slightly. Google claims that a version of
AlphaGo that runs on a single machine, was able to beat the distributed
version 25% of the time. Which would still give it a higher Elo than Sedol,
who only beat AlphaGo 20% of the time.

Now besides all that, there is an important point here. Once you get past the
accusations of "unfairness", it's still very interesting that human brains are
so energy efficient.

But the reason for that is that artificial neural networks are run on general
purpose hardware. Human brains are highly specialized hardware. General
purpose computers always consume vastly more energy than specialized circuits,
optimized for energy usage. GPUs compute every possible synapse to 32 bit
floating point precision. Most that computation is unnecessary. The majority
of synapses are 0, and only a few bits of accuracy are required on active
synapses.

I know this because there has been a lot of recent research on efficiently
running NNs. Especially on low budget hardware, like mobile phones or embedded
devices. This is something that is already possible, and is only going to get
better over time.

In the future AlphaGo could be ported to cheaper hardware, and even to
specialized FPGAs or ASICs. Those are incredibly energy efficient. But there
was no reason to do this for the match vs Sedol. The fact they didn't do this,
tells us nothing about the progress of AI.

------
debacle
> on the most sophisticated game we have constructed.

Starcraft, anyone?

~~~
ajuc
It's comparable, I'd say. And go is much more elegant.

