
Google’s AlphaGo AI defeats team of five leading Go players - sidcool
https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/26/googles-alphago-ai-defeats-team-of-five-leading-go-players/
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carbocation
Is playing go as a team something that people do? It seems unintuitive. I'd
expect a team of 5 experts to play worse than one expert.

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dengnan
It is common. The Chinese commentator Gu Li mentioned pair game and team game.
But I cannot find an English page about it. Here is a Chinese Wikipedia page.
[https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/团队围棋](https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-
hans/团队围棋)

FWIW, the five people team played with Ke Joe before the game and won (again,
according to Gu Li.)

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carbocation
Thank you. This is interesting and I didn't expect it!

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killin_dan
Playing go cooperatively is very different from chess or most other turn-based
tactical games in that combinatorics make the gamespace astronomically large.
Most pro players understand what impact this has on gameplay and how to adapt
their risk management strategies to the game. Way back in the day, popular man
v cpu strategies took into account the limitations of monte carlo simulations
and would intentionally make moves that change the game state as much as
possible to exploit how hard the computer would need to work in order to begin
finding optimal moves.

I think alpha go has advanced to the point where its unlikely human players
can reliably defeat it, but I think there are still opportunities for better
algorithmic players to defeat it.

Anyways, certain moves can cut off game states by the quadrillions, so it's
often pretty intuitive what an optimal response to a move is, given certain
context of the board and sometimes the player. In that respect, I'm curious
how pro level go is going to change after these alpha go games are studied,
because it has a very peculiar, decidedly calculatorish style of play, but
it's obviously very effective regardless. Go has prospered for so long because
there's so much room to express yourself in a move, pro players really play
with their whole soul, but computers are just taking advantage of the pure
mathematical angles of the game

It's fascinating stuff. I really want to see the alpha go team write a
starcraft ai or something like that.

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mackncheesiest
To be fair, AlphaGo probably utilizes ensembles of networks in some form
anyway. So, in a way, it's kind of been playing as a team this whole time :)

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Florin_Andrei
Well, what do you think your brain is? :)

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platz
a series of interconnecting drives, shafts, and levers?

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CodeCube
it's like the internet, a series of tubes!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs&ab_channel=super...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs&ab_channel=superfunky59)

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slobotron
At Osi Layer 4/5 that's a great analogy, dunno why people laugh at it...

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chr15
This is pretty amazing. It shows there is a level of intelligence that exists
above what these 5 can achieve collectively. Scientists have effectively
created life when something can make decisions for itself and outsmart humans.

Human intelligence has reached a ceiling and machines will get smarter and
smarter. In hundreds or thousands of years, AI will be smart enough to control
us. This Go game will manifest itself into reality - it will be a strategic
game of humans vs machines.

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sprafa
I'd say human intelligence hasn't reached a ceiling, only that it doesn't grow
as quickly as machine intelligence can.

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arcanus
Algorithms are the new 10x developer.

I'm actually half serious: one can see how something that is _slightly_ better
can have a massive multiplier, e.g. a team of inferior intelligences cannot
'scale' to beat a single superior intelligence in some regimes.

This does not apply to all fields, of course. But in many regions of
abstraction it may.

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nightski
With the caveat that it is a single, specific task. The team here of 5 is
probably capable of more than playing Go :) That's not all bad, there are
advantages to having something really good at one objective. But I wonder if
there is a fundamental trade off.

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blahbwah777
IMO, you're comparing from the wrong things.

AlphaGo is good at playing Go specifically, sure. But AlphaGo was built by
machine learning infra that is capable of doing more than just playing Go.

Google's ML capabilities as a whole are the 10x developer.

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dullgiulio
I've once read someone comparing the energy efficeincy of the human brain
compared to all the CPUs used by one of these neural networks. The human brain
turned out to be more efficient by many orders of magnitude.

Sadly I have no recollection of where I've read this.

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narrator
Luckily deep learning computers can directly use electricity produced from
sources that don't compete with human nutrition or we'd be in for a very dark
future.

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daveguy
You say that now, but then it installs a Dyson sphere. Very dark indeed.

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tokai
Have they done a human and AlphaGo vs AlphaGo yet? As I understand it centaur
teams of human and computer in chess are superior to computers or humans
playing alone. It would be interesting to see if this holds with go as well.

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foobar__
Where did you find this information for chess? It sounds unintuitive that a
superior player would benefit from a weak player's help.

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tokai
I can't give you the source I got it from, as it is something I have read
multiple times over the years from different sources. A quick search turns up
a lot of articles on the subject, with the claim that centaur teams are
better.[0]

I cannot follow you on the unintuitive part. If you have a chess program
playing against itself, as long as it isn't capable of playing a perfect game
every time, the program being supervised by a human should better, as the
human will have a non-zero chance of spotting a mistake (or a better move)
with enough plays. With low of the risk of mistakes from the weaker human, as
she can confer with the judgement of the program. If the risk of human error
is lower than the chance of human insight, the centaur team should have the
edge on the lone computer.

After checking up on the subject again, it seems like the effect is no longer
strong enough to topple the best chess computers though.[1]

[0][https://www.bloomreach.com/en/resources/blogs/2014/12/centau...](https://www.bloomreach.com/en/resources/blogs/2014/12/centaur-
chess-brings-best-humans-machines.html;) [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-
cassidy/centaur-chess-sho...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-
cassidy/centaur-chess-shows-power_b_6383606.html;)
[http://www.glassbeans.com/blog/why-centaurs-will-dominate-
th...](http://www.glassbeans.com/blog/why-centaurs-will-dominate-the-future/)

[1][https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/15772/how-do-
the-b...](https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/15772/how-do-the-best-
centaurs-compare-to-the-best-computers)

~~~
foobar__
I find it unintuitive when the strength difference between the two players is
too high, and I think matter-of-fact statements like in the stackoverflow
answer ("Of course, a human assisting a computer player will be stronger than
the same computer player alone") need to be questioned.

Imagine a beginner receiving suggested moves from a grandmaster. I can't see
how this beginner could be stronger than the grandmaster alone, and they would
almost certainly be weaker if they override just one of the grandmaster's
suggestions.

From what I read, chess AIs are this far above humans.

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EternalData
I thought this was supposed to be a few years away -- i.e beating Lee Sidol
was impressive, but Lee wasn't nearly the top player in the world?

Wow, this must be what it feels like to be living on a parabolic curve...

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daveguy
Lee Sedol was near the top (#7). He wasn't the very top, that was Ke Jie. And
now Ke Jie has been beaten 2/3, maybe 3/3 times.

Sedol was beaten soundly -- 4/5 games. So this is an improvement, but not an
exponential one.

Go is definitely conquered like chess was 1-2 decades ago.

[https://www.goratings.org/en/](https://www.goratings.org/en/)

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Deimorz
According to some information that the AlphaGo team released earlier in the
week, the current version of AlphaGo can give a three-stone handicap to the
version that played Lee Sedol: [http://www.usgo.org/news/2017/05/new-version-
of-alphago-self...](http://www.usgo.org/news/2017/05/new-version-of-alphago-
self-trained-and-much-more-efficient/).

I don't know if that qualifies as "exponential", but that's a _massive_
difference in skill at the game. If it's accurate at all, I think there's
basically zero chance that a human will ever beat AlphaGo again.

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cjbprime
Wow, hadn't seen that, that's terrifying.

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Deimorz
Terrifying in some ways, but I think it's also inspiring. It's pretty amazing
to have some evidence that there's still that much "room" left at the top of
the game for players to continue improving.

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farhanhubble
An interesting thing to observe in the long run would be if humans playing
against AI are able to improve their moves and beat the AI.

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31reasons
This is going to make all the Go players out of job pretty soon. :)

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pdpi
No more than Deep Blue put pro chess players out of a job.

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Jach
It should be interesting to see how a prevalence of stronger-than-human go
bots will influence the next generation of players. Magnus Carlsen relies on
Chess bots extensively for analysis and preparation (though not really as
opponents since they're too good), how much stronger than Ke Jie is now will
be the Go player of the future who comes of age using such tools? And for the
existing pros already, will we soon see a large divide in those who embrace
using such tools (and studying their games with each other / good humans as
has already been done with the Master series) and those who dislike them?

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jayramone
Machine vs human is never fair. That is like Usain Bolt vs a modern car.

