
Google’s AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I - zt
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/business/google-deepmind-alphago-go-champion-defeat.html
======
taylorwc
Andrej Karpathy had some awesome tweets on this yesterday, you can see the
thread in the links, but these two were my favorite:

"Yes AlphaGo only won by 0.5, but it was not at all a close game. It's an
artifact of its training objective."[0]

and:

"it prefers to win by 0.5 with 99.9999999% chance instead of 10.0 with 99.99%
chance."[1]

[0][https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985)
[1][https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121)

~~~
bpodgursky
I know it's a totally different game, but it would be interesting to see
AlphaGo play a game optimized for expected number of points, instead of low
variance wins. I assume it would require retraining.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
I would really love to see an AlphaGo with even the minimal tweak of maximize
points while maintaining win % > 95%.

I really wouldn't be shocked in those final moves it was optimizing for 5 or 6
"9"s of success probability. Which will still true to programming, it also
obfuscates how good it really it.

That said, there is some benefit to not completely embarrassing your human
player who previously was known as the best, but has volunteered to be beaten
repeatedly on international TV.

Going into this Ke Jie knew he was going to lose, and still agreed.

Speaking as an inexperienced go player, I would not be shocked if the new
Alpha Go were 500-1000 Elo points better than Ke Jie. It's true skill being
masked by its ultra-conservative style of play.

The original AlphaGo only lost a single game to Lee Sedol that was essentially
just a bug, not because it was "weaker". DeepMind has said this completely
retrained AlphaGo is significantly stronger than the original.

[1] Partial support for the possibly 1000 pt Elo advantage of Alpha Go.
[http://en.chessbase.com/post/alphago-vs-lee-sedol-history-
in...](http://en.chessbase.com/post/alphago-vs-lee-sedol-history-in-the-
making)

~~~
gort
> that was essentially just a bug

I'm not sure that's right, everything was working correctly, it just didn't
read out a low-probability move very deep.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
I'd agree it was an algorithmic bug and not an implementation bug.

From my reading, it essentially got AlphaGo into a state where it was no
longer reading the board correctly. The algorithmic bug was play a decent but
extremely improbable move and AlphaGo won't know how to respond.

Or by a similar argument, I think most people would say that if Lee Sedol
hadn't played that move and the game continued 'normally' he would've lost
like the other games. The rarity of the move is why he won, not the
"strength".

Essentially they trained the app on too specific data. Their main fix was to
retrain the next version from "scratch" instead of from moves humans are
likely to make.

------
dcx
The game is available here for anyone interested -
[http://events.google.com/alphago2017/](http://events.google.com/alphago2017/)

It's a half-point win which doesn't seem like a lot, but AlphaGo is
intentionally taking lower-risk paths to lock down the win in exchange for
some win margin. If you watch the actual game and some commentary, it really
feels like AlphaGo is playing at the next level. Some of its moves are so
inhuman and subtle.

This is a very exciting time for Go; a lot of traditional wisdom has been
shaken up in the last couple of years! I heard a story about a Korean pro
study group that was doing nothing but studying AlphaGo's games for new
insights for some time. I'm looking forward to seeing the future of play as
extremely strong Go AI becomes more widely accessible.

~~~
cjbprime
Yes, it's exciting that a half point win gives us no bound on the strength
difference betwen the human player and AlphaGo -- the human player could play
"twice as well" and still lose by 0.5.

The best way to test strength, assuming Ke Jie continues to lose, would be to
start giving handicap stones until the winrate stabilizes. I'd guess that
AlphaGo is no more than two stones stronger, but maybe that's just more bias
towards humans..

~~~
mattnewton
In the match commentary they talk about why no one is likely to take them up
on that offer, because losing at a handicap would be devastating for the self
confidence of a pro.

~~~
CamperBob2
I don't understand that. Should an Olympic weightlifter lose confidence if he
can't beat a forklift?

~~~
chki
I think the difference is that Go is played on a psychological level as well,
while weightlifting is (mainly) not. Somebody mentioned this in another Go
Thread on hn a few days ago: Professionell Go players do not like to play
against "weak" players because they are afraid of the psychological damage an
(unlikely) loss might have on their play.

~~~
CydeWeys
You can imagine the same applying to MMA fighters, too. The outcome is never a
sure thing; you can always catch a lucky punch from someone much less skilled
than you and lose in the most embarrassing manner possible, by knockout. Hell,
look at how Ronda Rousey's self esteem was shattered from a single such loss.

Weightlifting isn't the best example because it's a big group competition
without the individual 1-on-1 aspect to it, and chance plays less of a role.
Yeah, you might feel out of sorts on competition day because you didn't peak
in your training properly, lift 20 kg left than you're capable of, and
subsequently not place, but it's not supremely embarrassing. You're still a
very strong person, which you demonstrated. Rousey, though, just got
demolished.

------
partycoder
According to Deepmind, this version of Alpha Go (aka Master) is 3 stones
stronger than the version that defeated Lee Sedol. Prior to this match it had
a 60-0 record against high professional dans (on faster game settings, but
still). Right now it would be something like a 13-dan pro, almost impossible
to beat.

The natural occurrence of a human being capable of defeating a bot like this
would be very rare, and would take decades to train. In the case of this bot,
you just set up a cluster and deploy the same software, to produce as many
instances of this bot as you want in less than a day. In this sense, AI has a
huge advantage.

Finally, by the time a human being can beat this version of the bot, there is
going to be a much stronger version.

~~~
forgot-my-pw
I would like to see the next game with 1 stone handicap and the 3rd game with
3 stone handicap.

But Ke Jie probably will take that as an insult.

~~~
partycoder
I don't know about that.

While it might not be very gratifying to lose to a computer, players often
enjoy the opportunity to play stronger players and learn something new.

Then, the way to be a professional 9 dan involves a lot of losing and
frustration. I don't think he is very thin-skinned in this respect.

------
dpeck
This represents a fairly major milestone in game A.I. doesn't it?

I only took one A.I. class in school and had a few that involved games as
projects and remember several times the lecturers/professors (10 years ago)
mentioning that Go was a next level target after chess due to extremely high
branching factor.

~~~
vorg
I wonder if playing Go on a much larger board (e.g. 37 x 37) would limit the
ability of AlphaGo to explore branching significantly to tip the advantage
back to humans. I'm not sure if A.I. is limited by branching sizes. And would
human intuition of strategy on a 19 x 19 board map easily to the strategy of a
37 x 37 board? After all, Go is still Go no matter what size the board,
whereas chess can only be called chess when played on the 8 x 8 board.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Board size would hamper old brute force algorithms.

Modern Go AI also has "intuitive" components just like we do (large neural
networks trained to immediately provide a heat map of what should be the next
best move). That NN is not limited by board size.

BTW, even when playing by "intuition" alone (no tree search), AlphaGo is still
incredibly strong. It would still beat most amateur players that way.

------
derialstrazus
It's so accurate to call this a Sputnik moment for China. I wonder if we'll
see a face off between AlphaGo and a Chinese Go AI sometime in the future.

~~~
Stanleyc23
yea totally agree. the fact that state media shut down the broadcast speaks to
some loss of face.

Something organized in good spirits like an AI Olympics would be amazing to
watch.

------
deegles
It would be awesome if AlphaGo were released as an online-playable version but
with an adaptive difficulty. Either by choosing a desired rank or just setting
it to "try to win %50 of the time" or similar.

I feel like that would lead to a new generation of players trained on new
strategies from a blank slate. Could be interesting.

Disclosure: I only know the basics about playing Go :)

------
jonbarker
Humans are still better on a watt per watt basis!

~~~
polishTar
Not for much longer! Apparently this iteration of AlphaGo is using 10x less
computational power than the version that beat Lee Sedol.

~~~
jonbarker
Interesting, is there a link to this?

~~~
forgot-my-pw
[https://youtu.be/Z-HL5nppBnM?t=21580](https://youtu.be/Z-HL5nppBnM?t=21580)

More will be published by end of this week

------
nopinsight
People who believe that AGI is too far away to be concerned about should keep
in mind that very few people, even AI enthusiasts and experts, predicted 5
years ago that we would have a human-pro-level Go playing program now.

Prior to 2015, no programs could compete evenly with any among hundreds of Go
professionals. Two years later, even the human World Champion admits that his
competency is far below that of a computer program.

"I am quite convinced by this loss that AlphaGo is really strong. From AlphaGo
there are lots of things that are worthwhile learning and exploring." \-- Ke
Jie

The time to start working on and funding AI Safety research is now.

Note: I am not saying that AGI is imminent. The point is that we do NOT know
when it will emerge and AI Safety research is very difficult and will likely
take a long time to complete.

~~~
alkdfhasf
This means as much in terms of progress towards AGI as did DeepBlue's win over
Kasparov.

------
gene-h
AlphaGo has won one game out of three so far, it's not over yet.

~~~
jostmey
AlphaGo already won the first game, which 5 years ago would have been
considered impossible. It is basically over. Google can pour an order of
magnitude more computing power at the algorithm to boost its performance if
they choose too.

~~~
thomasahle
The question of performance as a function of computing power is an interesting
one. Demis Hassabis claims that the returns are diminishing quickly when going
above the system they are using. In fact Alpha Go Ke Ji uses 10 times less
power than Alpha Go Lee Sedol, though the architecture has changed to using
Google's own TPUs, so it's not an easy comparison.

In either case Alpha Go Ke Ji is said to be 3 stones stronger than Alpha Go
Lee Sedol which the team claims comes nearly completely from algorithm
improvements.

~~~
jvolkman
Google has stated previously that the Lee Sedol variant also used TPUs.

------
mirimir
> He would treat the software more as a teacher, he said, to get inspiration
> and new ideas about moves.

Interesting.

------
spcelzrd
In the future, only poets will have jobs.

j/k someone will have to program the poets

~~~
emtel
See "The First Sally -or- Trurl's Electronic Bard", page 12 of the pdf (43 of
the book) [http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-
content/uploads/Reading/Lem...](http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-
content/uploads/Reading/Lem-cyberiad.pdf)

Keep in mind this is all a translation from Polish.

------
Apofis
I, for one, look forward to more articles starting with "It isn’t looking good
for humanity." in the coming decades.

------
perseusprime11
Tomorrow there will be another story on flawed centaurs narrative which I
never understand. How is the Human + AlphaGo > AlphaGo narrative not fail on
smell test?

~~~
haltingthoughts
The space of playing go is rather large and humans only need to be better at a
small portion of it to improve upon AlphaGo. Humans+Computer was better than
just Computer for chess (at long time controls) for nearly 10 years after
BigBlue beat Kasparov.

~~~
perseusprime11
That centaur narrative seems to have debunked a while back:
[http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti...](http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=272)

~~~
haltingthoughts
That is for a recent tournament. Now computers are just better. But for up to
5-10 years centaurs were better. Eventually human Go players won't be able to
improve on computer evaluations, but that is may not be for another few years.

~~~
perseusprime11
Let's see. I think there are some centaur like tournaments going on for
AlphaGo as well.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Now limit AlphaGo to the same power budget and see who wins.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
A human eats maybe 2500 calories per day, right? That's about 100 watts, I
think? That's a pretty serious restriction.

~~~
kllrnohj
2500 kcals/day would be around 121 watts, yeah.

But computers have much lower idle consumption than humans. So if we assume
alphago idles at ~45w that would consume around 1000 kcal for 21 hours leaving
1500 kcal for the 3 hours it was given to think which would be more like 580
watts.

That sounds pretty doable.

------
SurrealSoul
I wonder how games will be 10~ years in the future. "Check the box to make
sure you are human" will be the largest feature

~~~
shaftway
Clearly this checkbox will be AI's next target.

------
yters
Once we have AI writing AI, then we can say AI is on par with humans.

~~~
JosephLark
That seems like an odd version of the AI Effect [0], where "when a technique
reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence".

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

~~~
yters
AI is a vague term. What we are trying to do is capture the human mind's
ability to solve problems in general. Otherwise it's like solving a crossword
puzzle and calling the solution AI. It's the solving that is of interest not
the solution. These game playing algorithms are all trained on human games
with algorithms designed by humans. The only computer contribution is the
ability to churn through permutations really quickly, which is not
intelligence. Intelligence is the reduction in state space so it is small
enough for the churning to be of value. No AI can do this state space
reduction for us yet. We always need a human.

------
scarmig
The article makes a lot of PRC censors trying to subdue news about the match.
How much of this is a real tendency or cultural fear? How much of it is just
an attempt to kneecap Google/Alphabet?

~~~
Macuyiko
A little bit of both, I think, here is what was apparently send around:

[http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-
covera...](http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-coverage-ke-
jie-vs-alphago-games/)

and in Chinese:

[http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C...](http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C%9F%E7%90%86%E9%83%A8%E3%80%91-%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8Calphago%E5%AF%B9%E5%BC%88/)

"Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without
exception, may carry a live stream. If one has been announced in advance,
please immediately withdraw it. Please convey the gist of this to sports
channels. Again, we stress: this match may not be broadcast live in any form
and without exception, including text commentary, photography, video streams,
self-media accounts and so on. No website (including sports and technology
channels) or desktop or mobile apps may issue news alerts or push
notifications about the course or result of the match."

Sounds pretty harsh... will be interesting to see how the rest of the event
goes.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
That sounds absolutely absurd. Say what we may about the state of affairs in
the United States, but if the media was over forbidden from broadcasting an AI
competition, which is effectively educational research in nature, I think
there'd be a lot of uproar.

~~~
komali2
When I worked in China nearly a decade ago, the general mindset among my Party
friends was "there's no way this will last." Most of them had sent their kids
off to get Canadian citizenship because they weren't sure there would even
_be_ a PRC in the long term.

I haven't been back in a while but my guess is things have sort of "settled
in" more. The Chinese Firewall is absurdly effective - last I heard it was
difficult to even get a VPN through.

~~~
yourapostasy
That mindset comes from generational memory of high-risk political
instability. In the PRC, there has yet to emerge a population without a cohort
that personally experienced first-hand, or was passed by oral history with
strong impressions like second-hand recitations, political upheavals that
involved substantial loss of life, on the order of thousands or more. Get
caught, even if incidentally, on the wrong side, and there are dire
consequences. What will be interesting to monitor is whether or not the
children of your Party friends (the ones who were sent off to obtain Canadian
citizenship) do the same with _their_ children. If they all do, then that's
not a good signal. If there is abatement of the trend, then that's
encouraging.

