
Garry Kasparov: Open-Ended AI [video] - AlanTuring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-jLkaGS-Jg
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holstvoogd
ITT: People who refuse to watch the video because kasparov can't possibly know
anything else than chess. Being a great chess player doesn't make you an
expert in everything, but it also doesn't mean you can't say anything useful
about anything else than chess.

I think he has a valid point, then systems are specifically engineered to work
in a domain, for instance chess. The rules and aspects of the game are
programmed and then it can teach itself how to optimally play by those rules.
It is a very limited scope and VERY fa from general AI

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pianowow
This limited scope is still progress though, toward the general AI he is
saying will not come in the near future. The Alpha Zero project showed that it
could be adapted for any 2-player perfect information game. This is still
quite limited, but not nearly as much as a program like Stockfish is, which
will basically only ever play chess.

Perhaps the next step is bringing the system further into the realm of the
unknown in games, like chance and imperfect information. I don't know if
Google is continuing this, but it would be a shame if it wasn't.

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daveguy
They showed that the system could be adapted _to learn_ any two player perfect
info game.

Once it has learned Go it won't play chess. Also, it has to be manually
adapted.

By this logic minimax has also been shown to do the same:

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

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candiodari
Minimax is a general rule on how to optimally play 2 player games. It's about
as much of a learning algorithm, and as practical, as "buy low, sell high".

In pure form, it can't be applied to any game where you cannot enumerate every
last possible board position (so Chess and Go are out). And with heuristics,
those heuristics effectively become the algorithm and they're really complex.

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daveguy
The minimax principle is used in chess and go and any other competitive two
player perfect knowledge game. What improves is the selection of moves to
evaluate and the quality of the board evaluation. Chess and Go absolutely use
minimax with sleight, but important, modifications. Deep learning extensions
with Alpha Go were specifically for move selection and board evaluation.

Alpha beta pruning with heuristics is one of the most fundamental extensions
of minimax. It is still minimax.

The alpha go system still clearly applies only to perfect information 2 player
games, because it is fundamentally extended minimax.

Edit: I'm not saying the heuristic extensions of alpha go, or the
reinforcement learning of zero, aren't brilliant and important. That doesn't
take away from the basic fact that it is an algorithm for perfect info 2
player games and one of them at a time (even if modifications can adapt it to
other games). Heuristics will be fundamental to general intelligence, but
alpha go is not general intelligence.

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jyriand
A lot of comments dismiss Kasparov's thoughts because he is out of his
element(being one of the greatest chess players of all time, but apparently
his brain is too small to understand AI). Can anyone explain why he can't be
expert on AI? Is it because he doesn't have a degree in CS?

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vbezhenar
He can be an expert on AI, of course, but this assumption requires proof. He's
expert on chess and he proved it many times, but I'm not aware of anything
related to AI. That said, he's smart man, of course, and it's interesting to
listen to him anyway. I just have much more trust in people who actually work
in this industry.

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throwawayyx96
Kasparov apparently continues to believe that his expertise in chess transfers
to other disciplines. This isn't an uncommon phenomenon, even for people with
more serious qualifications in a not totally unrelated field. I also shouldn't
forget Hollywood actors - their views on scientific matters and foreign policy
carry a lot of weight because they're, ummmm, famous.

For the same reason I'm not rushing over to Amazon to snag Garry's books on
how to succeed in the boardroom, I won't be spending any time trying to digest
his musings on AI.

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brudgers
Many many people believe their expertise in one field transfers to other
disciplines. Chess expertise is not unique. Even though I generally agree
about this particular case, I am aware that I am not an expert on Kasparov or
AI. I am also aware that Kasparov is an expert on Kasparov and has practical
professional experience interacting with AI's...I mean IBM built AI's
specifically tuned for him and Kasparov has had decades to reflect on that
experience. He didn't just fall off the turnip truck in Artificial
Intelligence land.

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throwawayyx96
Neither Deep Blue nor the superior chess playing engines running on PC
hardware that came afterwards used machine learning. They relied on basic
heuristics as humans do to numerically evaluate a position (material,
activity, etc.) with the advantage that they could evaluate many more possible
move sequences than a human. They also had opening books to avoid losing games
from the outset and endgame tablebases to identify forced wins/draws with a
small number of pieces on the board. Only recently did Google come out with a
chess playing program that is actually ML-based, and it beat the top rated
'traditional' chess engine.

My point being, despite chess being considered a game that requires deep
thinking, the use of actual AI in chess is very very new. As far as I'm aware,
Kasparov had nothing to do with it let alone a deep understanding of it. He
wasn't even involved in the earlier development of computer chess playing
programs as they rose to the grandmaster level and eventually beyond his own
level (super grandmaster). He along with many others had confidently predicted
that machines would never beat humans in chess. So yes, I'm quite reluctant to
believe that he has any kind of vision on this topic.

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brudgers
_the use of actual AI in chess is very very new._

    
    
      Each generation thinks it invented sex.
      -- Heinlein

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raymondh
These topics are discussed in greater depth in Kasparov's book, "Deep
Thinking".

My view of the book: Very well written (and occasionally engrossing), well
thought out, and strikes a more hopeful/reasonable tone that anything else
I've seen on the subject.

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douglaswlance
All learning is reward-based. We can imitate human reward systems to start.
The machines will act like humans do: basically random behaviors at the start,
then following pleasure and rewards to shape their behavior.

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zi5yaolo8o6
what is the reward for learning for the joy of learning ?

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oliv__
hmm.. joy?

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wpasc
I think it's really funny that the video is Kasparov talking about AI working
in closed systems having difficulty adapting any knowledge from a closed
system to an open system.

While Kasparov is arguably the best player of all time and has a considerable
intellect and vast amounts of chess knowledge, I think the the knowledge
transfer from skill in chess to knowledge about other difficult, technical
fields is quite difficult. I'm in no rush to listen to his thoughts on
transfer learning in AI (although I did watch the video to confirm my
suspicion).

