
AlphaGo Can't Beat Me, Says Chinese Go Grandmaster Ke Jie - xianshou
http://www.shanghaidaily.com/national/AlphaGo-cant-beat-me-says-Chinese-Go-grandmaster-Ke-Jie/shdaily.shtml
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jgrahamc
The headline doesn't do justice to what he said. He actually said that he
thinks after watching the current games he has a 60% chance of winning, but
that AlphaGo will eventually beat him (perhaps in months, perhaps a few
years).

The headline makes it sound like he's being super-arrogant, but his actual
words tell a very different story.

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enneff
He's effectively saying as an outsider that he would have won the match just
played. But he has no way of knowing that. It's easy to see mistakes from the
outside. Seems like hubris to me.

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kqr
Also it's very likely if the human played stronger in the last match, the
computer also would have stepped up. Computers tend to sacrifice points (i.e.
"big leads") for assured victory, so unless the human is stronger than the
computer, you cannot know it's true potential.

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jacquesm
That's a common strategy in human game play and sports as well. It has been
observed many times that humans on their own in regular sports do much worse
than doing the same in competition against a somewhat stronger party. As they
say: one boat is a cruise, two boats, it's a race.

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fhe
He's the generally agreed world's best player (and only 20-years-old). but he
might not have seen the true strength of AlphaGo. After analyzing the games,
it's apparent that AlphaGo only tries to win, and does not try to win by a
large margin. Translate that strategy into game play, AlphaGo seems to always
try to stay ahead of its opponent by a few points, and often trades an optimal
move by a less-profitable one but one that's much safer. So even though the
two games with Lee have been close, no one has any idea how strong AlphaGo
really is.

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kerkeslager
I'd describe that a little differently: I think AlphGo's choosing safer moves
shows strength. In go you don't get any extra credit for winning by more; a
win by 0.5 is equivalent to a win by 50.5. As such there is no incentive to
fight for wins at a higher margin. If a more aggressive move is riskier or
harder to read (it usually is) there is actually a disincentive to play it. I
can't tell you how many games I've lost because I misread a complicated
variation which I could have avoided entirely when I was ahead.

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tyh
>"a win by 0.5 is equivalent to a win by 50.5 It don't matter if you win by an
inch or a mile. Winning's winning."

Which reminds me of some wisdom from Dominic Toretto "It don't matter if you
win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning."

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SixSigma
“The secret [to motor racing]”, said Niki Lauda, “is to win going as slowly as
possible”

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yiyus
The question (as Ke Jie says, but the headline hides) is not if AlphaGo will
beat him, but when.

I was taught a computer would not beat a professional player in my life time.
Now, there is maybe one player who can beat AlphaGo. I guess this won't be
true for too long. When? That would be an interesting bet.

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cat-dev-null
Exactly. Constrained (most games) AI singularity is near, because chess was
just the start.

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studentrob
You're reaching. Constrained AI singularity isn't a thing. It's singularity or
it isn't.

AI is definitely getting better, but it is all application specific. AI is not
at the point of setting its own goals or fixing all of its errors. We still
need humans for that.

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loup-vaillant
Bah, replace "singularity" with "superhuman", and we're set. We have
superhuman arithmeticians since the dawn of computing, superhuman chess
players since Deep Blue or so, superhuman Go players and superhuman drivers
are not too far off…

Superhuman programmer with intelligence explosion capabilities… yeah, that's a
whole 'nother game.

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studentrob
What's an intelligence explosion? Intelligence dissemination or deletion?

EDIT: Nevermind, just looked it up and found this was a real thing. I thought
you were joking.

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astrofinch
It sounds less weird if you think: "AI has automated _some_ jobs, and
eventually it may automate away most of them, in the same way (pending AlphaGo
victory) it's now automated winning at most board games... So what happens if
the job of _programmer_ gets automated away?"

(I'm convinced that programmers will take the AI-automating-all-the-jobs idea
more seriously once it's their own jobs that are on the line)

There are a few ways I can think of to object to this line of reasoning:

1) You could argue that programming will be a job that _never_ gets automated
away. But this seems unlikely--previous intellectual tasks (Chess, Jeopardy,
Go) were thought to be "essentially human", and once they were solved by
computers, got redefined as not "essentially human" (and therefore not AI). My
opinion: In the same way we originally thought tool use made humans unique,
then realized that other animals use tools too, we'll eventually learn that
there's no fundamental uniqueness to human cognition. It'll be matter &
algorithms all the way down. Of course, the algorithms _could_ be really darn
complicated. But the fact the Deepmind team won at both Go and Atari using the
same approach suggests the existence of important general-purpose algorithms
that are within the reach of human software engineers.

2) You could argue that programming will be automated away but in a sense that
isn't meaningful (e.g. you need an expensive server farm to replace a
relatively cheap human programmer). This is certainly possible. But in the
same way calculators do arithmetic much faster & better than humans do,
there's the possibility that automated computer programmers will program much
faster & better than humans. (Honestly humans suck so hard at programming
[https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/51714087842877440](https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/51714087842877440)
that I think this one will happen.) And all the jobs that we've automated 'til
now have been automated in this "meaningful" sense.

Neither of these objections hold much water IMO, which is why I take the
intelligence explosion scenario described by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom
seriously: [http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-
Strategies-N...](http://www.amazon.com/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-
Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111/)

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dclowd9901
There is one uniqueness to human cognition: the allowance to be fallible. AI
will never be able to solve problems perfectly, but whereas we are forgiven
that, they will not be because we've relinquished our control to them
ostensibly on exchange for perfection.

~~~
studentrob
It may interest you to know that machine learning algorithms often have an
element of randomness. So they are allowed to explore failures. Two copies of
the same program, trained separately and seeded with different random numbers,
may come up with different results.

I'm not saying there will or won't be AI some day, I just thought that point
was relevant to your comment.

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awwducks
From a go player's perspective, this would have been a more exciting match. Ke
Jie is largely considered the strongest player in the world right now whereas
Lee Sedol is marginally weaker but has better name recognition.

~~~
awwducks
I'd very much like to see Ke Jie try (and also beat) Alphago while it appears
to be in the realm of possibility.

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jiyinyiyong
He was playing a joke in Weibo since Google is banned in mainland China. Not
this "horrible" title :D

~~~
studentrob
Hah, that would be funny. AlphaGo can't beat him because Google can't go to
China? Touché

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zhte415
And Ke Jie was born in 1997. Wow.

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mcv
He was born after I started playing go in the 1990s. Man, I'm old.

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mtgx
I expected others to say that. Can't Google just allow anyone to play against
it online after these 5 matches with Sedol conclude?

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jacquesm
With the amount of computing power they throw at this I doubt that's something
even google could easily fund.

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malanj
Is running AlphaGo really that expensive? I get that training deep learning
systems is very computationally expensive, but my understanding is that
running them is orders of magnitude cheaper.

edit: table showing gains as CPUs are added -
[https://i.imgur.com/xxdWUtV.png](https://i.imgur.com/xxdWUtV.png)

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joosters
It's a huge cluster of machines.

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enneff
Got any numbers?

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tim333
The Economist says "The version playing against Mr Lee uses 1,920 standard
processor chips and 280 special ones developed originally to produce graphics
for video games"

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kyrra
If you price by the GCE calculator[0] it's $1920 to rent 1920 CPU cores for 20
hours. This doesn't include GPU costs as they don't seem to have GPUs
available on cloud, but I could see that easily doubling the costs.

[0]
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=f63f1fe0-56...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=f63f1fe0-5673-488d-a87a-c27e0dd0bece)

~~~
tim333
Daresay the Economist is unclear whether they are talking chips or cores so it
could be several times more cores.

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scyclow
I really wonder who would bother reading this entire article and still find
any value in the last line:

> Go is a complex ancient Chinese mind game played on a board with a 19x19
> grid of black lines.

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coldcode
I wonder if you jacked the game up to 23x23 or larger if the computer or the
human would have more difficulty or if it would make no difference.

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hodwik
The larger the board, generally, the harder for the computer to play it,
because it can't just pre-calculate all of the possible games.

Computers have been beating humans at 9x9 Wei Qi for quite a while, because
they can calculate all possible games just like Chess.

However, if Wei Qi machines are now being written to do pattern recognition,
rather than move by move brute-forcing, it may be a different story entirely.

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sobellian
Computers cannot calculate all possible chess games. The game tree complexity
of chess, 10^123, is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

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redblacktree
The problem space shrinks as the game develops though, so there does come a
point where it is possible to calculate all possible moves/outcomes.

~~~
sobellian
Of course, one can make the same argument about go. As I understand it
computers are quite good at the endgame.

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Zklsalue8
"Deep Blue is stupid, you know, it's a machine." Garry Kasparov before being
defeated by Deep Blue.

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macmac
Famous last words.

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PuffinBlue
Read the article.

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macmac
I did.

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dosaygo
It's on, seriously. Challenge accepted.

I think what Ke is underestimating however, is that the computer's learning
rate is better than a humans. Even if the computer is not in his game now, in
a little while it will exceed him.

Only a matter of time, Ke. Accept it.

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swang
If you had read the article Ke pretty much says this.

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dosaygo
AHAHAHAHA. "pretty much", "had read" \-- so you can read what others are doing
across time and space? Riiiight. Moron. Why would I listen to someone whose
joy comes from telling other people they were wrong on the internet. SO
meaningful. hahaha.

This is worth revisiting -- like the absolute idiocy of someone who assumes
that if another person, wholly unlike themselves, had read the same article,
then they would reach the same conclusion. Group think loser. I mean, that's
your assumption, right? Hahahah. Flubbing moron. Hahaha.

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meric
Are you OK? You seemed like a cool guy in the who's hiring comment but in this
thread you sound nuts. Look for help if you need it.

