
ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer - rbanffy
https://www.acm.org/media-center/2020/april/acm-prize-2019
======
eyerow
As a long-time Go player and ML guy who even built his own (albeit shitty) Go
AI in college, I'm a bit biased, but watching the AlphaGo-Lee Sedol match
really felt like watching our generation's moon landing.

If y'all haven't already, there's a new AlphaGo documentary made by DeepMind
on YT:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y).
Brought tears to my eyes. Both a triumph for humanity in building an
unbelievable machine like this, and a loss for humanity in that the infinite
mystery of Go will be diminished, and again a triumph for humanity in Lee
Sedol's brilliant win in Game 4...

~~~
starpilot
Q&A after winning game 4:

> What were you thinking when you made that play [move 78]?

> Lee Sedol: Move 78 was the only move I could see. There was no other
> placement. It was the only option for me, so I put it there.

~~~
snarf21
This is one of the things that bugs me a little in the AI vs Human games.
Reading the board is such a difficult skill in GO and humans get fatigued. We
have to visually track all the places we could move. It only takes missing one
of the top 10 moves on any given turn to lose against Alpha. It would be
interesting to have AG or AZ play Lee when he has a day for each move. I'm not
saying Alpha wouldn't still win but the computer is so fast and can consider
so many things that a human can't hold only in their thoughts.

I do think it is a great achievement how far AI or ML has come. Not to take
anything away from the team's accomplishments.

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asdfasgasdgasdg
Surely a great achievement. Although I feel a little bad for the team. I
assume Silver didn't write all the code or design the entire algorithm single-
handedly. But the recognition and the reward accrues to him alone. Ah, unjust
hierarchical society.

I guess the other members of the team are being compensated well enough at
DeepMind that $250k would be more icing than cake, but it still feels weird to
see that Silver is the only person named in the article when a number of other
world class researchers worked with him on this problem.

~~~
howlin
He's been working on Go for a very long time. Since he was a PhD student.
Though I am sure the team helped, don't think he wasn't the main driving
influence behind the algorithms and featurization of the problem.

~~~
lonelappde
Isn't the point of AlphaGo that Go is a minor detail?

~~~
kadoban
Doesn't sound right as the point of AlphaGo itself. Generalization to other
games came later, under other names (AlphaZero and MuZero).

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colmvp
I almost knew exactly who it was going to be when they mentioned AlphaGo
Developer.

For those who aren't that well versed in RL, I recommend watching his lectures
at UCL
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0)).
Really clear explanations that went hand in hand when I was reading Sutton and
Barto's introductory book.

~~~
manthideaal
Another link with pdf with lectures, exam and assigment and a link to video of
lectures in (1)

(1)
[https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/](https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/)

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WalterBright
I struggled for years to develop an AI that played the computer strategy for
Empire.

[http://www.classicempire.com/](http://www.classicempire.com/)

I'd just run games, look at results, and endlessly tweak the strategy.
Recently I learned how neural networks worked, and realize I could finally
make a computer strategy that was competent. It could be trained by playing
zillions of games against itself.

My only defense is that training a neural network was impractical on the
machines Empire was developed on.

It's hard to resist going back to Empire and doing this.

~~~
viralpoetry
How you ended up implement it in the code? Is it just a heuristic implemented
as a series of if/else/case statements? Minimax? Thank you

EDIT: sorry, I found out that source code is available, I will try to find it

EDIT2: Looks like it's up for sale, not open

~~~
WalterBright
[https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-
PDP-10](https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-10)

It's the same algorithm. Mainly a bunch of ad-hoc heuristics.

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e19293001
Congratulations David Silver! I am currently learning Reinforcement Learning,
as a coincidence I am watching David Silver's Introduction to Reinforcement
Learning[0]. He explains it very clearly. I would recommend it for those who
want to start to learn RL. Thank you David! Excellent!

[0] - [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYmG7hTraZDM-
OYHWgPe...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqYmG7hTraZDM-
OYHWgPebj2MfCFzFObQ)

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pixelpoet
Well deserved! AlphaGo was simply a revolution.

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hyperpallium
Not to AlphaGo, whew, we're not there yet.

