
Exploring the mysteries of Go with AlphaGo and China’s top players - beefman
https://deepmind.com/blog/exploring-mysteries-alphago/
======
itchyjunk
The players who played against AlphaGo and lost said they got something
valuable out of it. They started looking at completely new possible
combination of moves they hadn't thought viable before. (The guy that played
against AlphaGo before Lee Sedol said how it improved him. He even climbed
several ranks.)

This makes me wonder. Maybe the human brain never computers for global
optimas. It gets to a point where it's good enough and then stops. Clearly, if
they play vs AI and then start improving their strategy again, the brain might
have thought defeating most human is a good enough strategy.

This is also see in other games, someone who plays in "easy" difficulty or low
ranked games in multi player games are stuck with "bad habits". As in they do
really well in those thresholds but perform poorly when introduced to higher
difficulty. But as soon as there is a need, good players rapidly adjust.
(Example: In MOBA games like leauge of legend or Dota, higher ranked players
adapt at a much higher rate to new emergent strategies while lower level
player tend to not manage this and find things unbalanced.)

My point is, as we discover more of these `slighly better than human AI`,
we'll also discover that human brain might be capable of much more. It just
never saw the need to pour more resources in it till it found a healthy
competition. Our only (soon to be) sentient friend, the AI.

\--------------------------------------

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-NdPtFKq0)

~~~
ooqr
So then I wonder if with enough play, people can beat AlphaGo once more. Maybe
would should let people have a chance to keep playing against AlphaGo till
they recover from the flaws it finds in human games, and maybe human
creativity can win out once more.

~~~
xbmcuser
> So then I wonder if with enough play, people can beat AlphaGo once more.
> Maybe would should let people have a chance to keep playing against AlphaGo
> till they recover from the flaws it finds in human games, and maybe human
> creativity can win out once more.

Alpha go learns just like humans it is not standing still for humans to catch
up.

~~~
goatlover
What if the size of Go board was increased? Does AlphaGo scale as well as
expert human players?

~~~
eru
Probably better, actually. (But that's just a guess.)

~~~
Florin_Andrei
Humans are limited by the size of their skull. Computer systems have no such
limitation.

------
Hexcles
Wow! I knew the Ke Jie vs AlphaGo would come one day, and probably the human
team vs AlphaGo, but didn't expect the "Pair Go" (human + AlphaGo vs another
human + AlphaGo). Interesting to see.

~~~
sharun
Centaur chess has been a thing since Deep Blue. I think the problem their
future of ai stuff is having is most orgs have no idea which of their zillion
problems actually needs this tech. Hopefully this will raise more awareness.

~~~
pps43
I thought people stopped doing Centaur chess when it turned out that
human+computer usually loses to computer alone.

There are still positions that people evaluate correctly but computers
misjudge, but those are pretty rare.

~~~
posterboy
Pretty is nice, tell more please.

~~~
pps43
As early as 2013: [http://www.businessinsider.com/computers-beating-humans-
at-a...](http://www.businessinsider.com/computers-beating-humans-at-advanced-
chess-2013-11)

Next year: [https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-
nakamura-...](https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfish-outlasts-
nakamura-3634)

And computers were only getting better since then.

~~~
xoroshiro
It's not as far as people might think though.

If I recall correctly, Nakamura used an older version of a weaker chess engine
(Rybka). He also tried to force a relatively equal position (since he was
behind in points anyway) which led him to lose because of risky play.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if Stockfish would lose to Stockfish + Nakamura
or any of the leading chess players. These people have been using chess
engines for analyses for quite a while now and certainly know their
limitations.

~~~
pps43
The key idea of human+computer is that human does strategy and position
evaluation, and computer calculates tactics and acts as a safety net to
prevent human blunders. A weaker chess engine would still perform that
function.

Granted it's all conjecture since no large competitions took place, but the
mere fact that no such competitions took place suggests that the outcome
probably won't be pleasant for humans.

~~~
xoroshiro
My point was tat with the same chess engine, man with machine beats machine.

I do see your point about position evaluation though. And yes, it would be
interesting to see a tournament.

~~~
pps43
I actually have not seen any recent cases when a human with chess engine was
beating the same chess engine more often than a random chance would imply.

It used to be the case before about 2012-2014, but now the gap is so large
that a human can only make things worse.

------
rshm
There is another NN engine from Tencent making progress for last couple of
weeks.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Art_\(software\))

~~~
gort
Fine Art's played a lot the on Fox server. It actually hadn't been seen since
March 11 (at which time it was still losing sometimes), but is playing again
today...

------
dwaltrip
Has deepmind done any additional training of AlphaGo since last spring?

The training that AlphaGo underwent between fall of 2015 and the match against
Lee Seedol in March 2016 seemed quite effective.

~~~
yohui
Yes. From the press conference:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/64hmu2/watch_live_pr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/64hmu2/watch_live_press_conference_of_alphago_vs_ke_jie/dg2d1ti/)

> _Last year, the AlphaGo that played against Lee Sedol was v18. The Master
> that achieved 60-0 was v25. Which version will play this time?_

> _Scott Beaumont: The exact version of AlphaGo will have to be introduced by
> the experts working on the project, but it will be the newest version.
> Defeating Ke Jie is no easy task, and AlphaGo has been continually
> improving. Also, we hope to continually improve Go as an art, through the
> wisdom of the players and AI in cooperation._

(Magist/Master was the handle under which AlphaGo played 60 online blitz games
last December:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo#Unofficial_online_matc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo#Unofficial_online_matches_in_late_2016_to_early_2017)
)

~~~
dwaltrip
Very cool, thanks for the details. I didn't realize the version playing as
"master" was 7 versions after than what Lee Seedol faced!

------
raverbashing
Can AlphaGo run behind the Great Firewall?

I think that for the match with Lee Sedol it was offloading computation to
(some form of) Google Cloud no?

~~~
pmontra
This is not a semi clandestine match. The collaboration with the Chinese
Government stated in the post should take care of that, a reliable connection
to the AlphaGo servers at home.

~~~
raverbashing
Probably

Also (if this is optimized) the information exchange back and forth should be
minimum (board position and next move selected by AlphaGo takes very little
space)

------
zeristor
Is AlphaGo written in the Golang to play Go?

~~~
eru
No.

------
wslh
This is exciting. Kasparov was prescient when he talked about and promoted
advanced chess [1]. The concept was older but he was very humble on accepting
this possibility. Magnus Carlsen training is with computers [2]. I would love
to see Carlsen playing against the top computer chess program now. He is the
"New Hope".

BTW, it seems we are experiencing here in HN some kind of AI fundamentalism
since the downvote rush doesn't correlate with this normal comment. I am not
arguing against the downvotes, just that sych reactionary behavior was not
expected.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess)

[2] [http://m.dw.com/en/world-chess-champion-magnus-carlsen-
the-c...](http://m.dw.com/en/world-chess-champion-magnus-carlsen-the-computer-
never-has-been-an-opponent/a-19186058)

~~~
arcticfox
> I would love to see Carlsen playing against the top computer chess program
> now. He is the "New Hope".

I don't understand; he would get destroyed. Do you mean just to see what it
would look like?

~~~
wslh
The answer is: we don't know yet.

~~~
tedsanders
We do know, with essentially 100% certainty. Carlson's elo rating is mid 2800s
and the top engines are high 3300s. A 500 pt rating difference implies he has
less than a 5% chance of winning a single game, let alone a match.

Plus, he can play against an engine any time he wants. If he could beat them
in some magically surprising way, would it make any sense for him to be
keeping this amazing skill a secret from the world? No.

~~~
wslh
> the top engines are high 3300s.

Sources?

~~~
nl
Seriously?

[https://www.google.com.au/search?q=chess+engine+elo+rating](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=chess+engine+elo+rating)

And we don't know "with 100% certainty", but we can calculate a projected
win/loss probability using those ELO ratings[1]

A 3300 rated chess engine vs Carlsen at 2850 gives a 93% win probability to
the chess computer.

That's roughly the same probability of an International Master raned player
(ELO 2300) beating Carlsen.

The top ranked engine is Stockfish, rated 3500+

[1]
[http://www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/bnewell.php?itemid=279](http://www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/bnewell.php?itemid=279)

~~~
remus
ELO scores can only be compared across a single pool of players, and those
scores you linked to are from computer v computer tournaments only. The
absolute scores aren't comparable because you can effectively adjust the
absolute score by adjusting the parameters you start the system off with.

As far as Im aware no engines compete against humans regularly enough to get
an ELO score (presumably because watching a computer thrash human players for
a few hundred games isnt that interesting).

~~~
nl
Sure, the rating compression thing is a valid criticism.

There's little doubt they are much stronger than humans though. There are
enough online games that if this wasn't so it would show up.

