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In the Age of Google DeepMind, Do the Young Go Prodigies of Asia Have a Future?
- carbocation 11y agoIn the age of Deep Blue, do young chess prodigies have a future?
- daveguy 11y agoSomeone should ask Magnus Carlsen. Edit: fortunately the fine article brings this up and goes further to point out that go is fundamental to self improvement in some cultures and will likely have a long life after AlphaGo.
- zhemao 11y agoIn the age of Watson, does Jeopardy have a future?
- JorgeGT 11y ago[13th century] In the age of gunpowder, do young archery prodigies have a future?
- daveguy 11y agoThis is a good one. It was still many many centuries later before it stopped being a tool in war and from a competitive prospect it is still kickin (although not pervasive)
- verroq 11y agoIn the age of high tech robot replacements, do unskilled factory workers have a future?
- hemdawgz 11y agoThis one unfortunately isn't analogous with the others.
- iopq 11y agoThey actually do not.
- ZenoArrow 11y agoThe analogy only works if people do the particular activity for pleasure, so the question becomes... is it possible to find pleasure in factory work? One could argue that it's possible, but it may look different to what it does today. Some people may enjoy the feeling of refined manual dexterity, so games could emerge where activities like packing boxes at speed becomes a sport, in a similar vein to how cup stacking is a sport now.
- chenglou 11y agoI mean, that's like asking whether marathon runners have a future now that we've got cars. Exercising one's brain/having pleasure through the game could be an end in itself, and is independent of how machines perform.
- nothis 11y agoI like that analogy a lot! It's not like "playing Go really well" ever solved any real-world problem, it has always been a competition among humans. What should change, there?
- ng12 11y agoI feel like the author completely misunderstood why AlphaGo is exciting. It's about advancements in technology and soft AI, Go has almost nothing to do with it.
- mquander 11y agoMaybe that's why AlphaGo is exciting to you. I don't give a shit about technology and AI compared to how much I want to watch AlphaGo play more games of Go, and I suppose that professionals probably feel the same way.
- nothis 11y agoWell, we're on hackernews, we like the tech stuff. For most of the world, this news is where people learn about Go and the human player's "humiliation" (whether or not the Go community sees it that way) is the story. I'd argue, though, that this is merely a proof of deep learning being able to solve "hard" problems. There's headlines everywhere about deep learning solving previously "impossible" image recognition problems, for example. Fields that are much more interesting and relevant in their real-world impact. AlphaGo, in comparison, seems like a PR/pet project. It mostly exists to play Go really well. It's a sub-branch of uses of the technology, not a start.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
- shas3 11y agoThe game play among human competitors is sure to change just as in chess, as new players will train on AlphaGo, etc. whose gameplay will differ significantly from accepted norms in a purely human playing field. For instance, chess programs can plan and optimize to a much further depth (number of moves) in terms of strategy. So, newer players like Carlsen, etc. play differently these days than older ones like Anand, etc. [1] [1] http://noenthuda.com/blog/2016/03/11/how-computers-have-changed-chess/ http://noenthuda.com/blog/2016/03/11/how-computers-have-chan...
- reidacdc 11y agoThis is already happening. Down at the end of a recent Wired article about Fan Hui, the European champion who lost to AlphaGo recently, it mentions that his close interactions with the software has changed his view of the game, and his ranking has also moved, from 633 "into the 300s". The relevant paragraph is the one with the heading "Machine changes human", at the end. http://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadness-beauty-watching-googles-ai-play-go/ http://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadness-beauty-watching-googles...
- ilaksh 11y agoWhy should I really be concerned about Go prodigies? Aren't there a lot more ordinary people being affected by technological unemployment who have much fewer resources to fall back on?
- mirimir 11y agoSuch as lawyers. And truck drivers, of course. But there's so much more to this than human obsolescence. This is the cusp of a new stage in evolution.
- mirimir 11y agoMaybe if they learn to collaborate with AI. Or eventually, get implants. As all serious professionals will need to do. That may seem far-fetched, but how many runners compete with bicyclists?
- Pamar 11y agoIn general I'd suggest reading "The player of Games" by Banks. A Culture novel that explores why would someone care about being good at "boardgames" in a universe where even the dumbest appliance could easily outperform any human.
- JabavuAdams 11y agoOne thing that Banks never addressed in his Culture novels was humans wanting to become Minds. I mean if I live in a society where there are humanoids and Minds, then I want to be a Mind, with a stream-of-consciousness that includes the transition. Wouldn't this be true of many people who are in to science?
- saalweachter 11y agoDidn't the Minds manipulate culture to channel their charges in various directions (ie, against war-like tendencies)? Maybe ascension was one of the thought-patterns they engineered out.
- Filligree 11y agoThey did. It isn't explicitly stated, to the best of my knowledge, but the Minds are smart enough that they could easily have done that—and were shown to engineer other parts of the society, such as their deathism. Humanity has very limited purpose in the Culture. On the surface, it looks nice, but they're effectively pets. Their willingness to ascend was cut off right along with their willingness to live. All of which is done by social engineering. If you want to go the intelligence-enhancement route, they'll help. They just make sure that very few people do.
- david-given 11y agoThat's true, but it's also rather deceptive. Humans are the fundamental core of the Culture; its basic purpose is to look after human-scale people, and this shapes everything it does --- the Culture's a bit suspicious of ascension because they feel it's an abandonment of their responsibilities. Humans are, in effect, the Minds' religion. And dying is just one of several end-of-life events you can pick, if you want to (including opting out entirely). Naturally it's the one we tend to focus on, because it's the only one we currently have, but the Culture's got lots.
- partycoder 11y agoIn the age of computers and pocket calculators, does mental calculation have a future?
- Animats 11y agoFrom the article: "It is estimated that, of South Korea’s three hundred and twenty pros, only around fifty are able to earn a living on tournament winnings." This isn't going to result in massive unemployment. However, cheating with computer assistance is likely to become a problem, as it is in chess.[1] (The state of the art in computer chess is now roughly at "laptop with off the shelf program can curb-stomp human world champion.") [1] http://en.chessbase.com/post/yet-another-case-of-cheating-in-chess http://en.chessbase.com/post/yet-another-case-of-cheating-in...
- zitterbewegung 11y agoWhat kind of configuration would you need to run the DeepMind setup? Looking at the wikipedia page if we assume the setup [1] there then it seems like at this time it would be out of the realm of feasibility at this time of setting up this software for cheating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo#Hardware
- iopq 11y agoBut given the strength of the distributed program, the desktop version is already professional strength because of diminishing returns.
- aikinai 11y agoGoogle's infrastructure gives it an extra boost, but even the single machine version can beat the distributed version 25% of the time.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/708489093676568576 https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/708489093676568576
- wheresmypasswd 11y agoThe nice thing about most of this deep learning stuff is that you can use a million machine hours to train your model, and almost no time to make an evaluation. So the single machine version has all of the pattern recognition given to it by the cluster, but a few ply less tree search depth. So to me this underscores the relative importance of the deep learning model vs the tree search.
- partycoder 11y agoGo has still much more to offer as it is not even close to be a solved game. Additionally, there's handicap Go, and additionally handicaps can be applied to the machine. Go offers the possibility for players of different levels to enjoy a game.
- burritofanatic 11y agoWell, absolutely, if they're talking about Golang that is. In all seriousness, a computer did fairly well on Jeopardy some years back, and we're still watching the game show as it's still quite relevant.
- eru 11y agoAnd a trained human + computer with internet access (Google search!) could beat the best humans in Jeopardy for quite a while now.
- chongli 11y agoNot really. Jeopardy is all about buzzer timing[0]. With Google search, you're always going to be slow on the buzzer. That's okay, though. The actual trivia is pretty easy. It's designed this way to be accessible to the average TV viewer. [0] http://www.pisspoor.com/buzzer.html http://www.pisspoor.com/buzzer.html
- furyofantares 11y agoBuzz then search. I think players tend to work this way too, buzzing as soon as they feel like they'll know the answer, but before they actually consciously have it.
- dinkumthinkum 11y agoIt seems like the authors are trying to use the latest story in the Go world to write about how all the jobs will be replaced by neural networks or something. I mean, people still throw javelins even though it is fairly trivial to build a machine that shoots a projectile farther than a human can throw. We still enjoy trivia games even though it is easy to google the answers. I dunno, I think it is a bit of a stretch to think AlphaGo has ended serious competitive human Go.
- fiatmoney 11y agoThe safest best for sectors of the economy that will continue to prosper under a hard-AI regime are those that involve making humans, especially the rich (eg, owners of AI-based companies) feel happy via human interactions. Go instructors are such a niche. Actually I would expect game-players and game-instructors to do better than the median profession under such a scenario, because playing games against other humans for entertainment & pure enjoyment of competition is a very human pursuit.
- sterl 11y ago...Have Chess players had a future...?!
- mark_l_watson 11y agoGood writing. I also expect that more people will start playing Go, or like me, get a renewed interest in the game. I read that Lee Sidol is planning on retiring from active play in a few years and move to the USA to evangelize the game in the West. I played the South Korean national champion and the women's world champion in handicapped exhibition games in the 1970s. It would be awesome to get to do the same with Lee Sidol!
- mapt 11y agoAll AI does is remove the ability to progress through the ranks accurately via online play. Unregulated online competition will suddenly become a bumpy road full of Elo-breaking presences. I gather this may be a Big Deal, but except insofar as it kills the sport by a thousand cuts, 'Young Go Prodigies' have nothing to worry about.
- eru 11y agoThe computer will be able to give you an Elo number just by looking at all the moves you did in a few games. Since the computer can tell for every single move whether you played perfectly or if not, by how much you decreased your chances of winning against perfect competition, you'll be able to get a hundred signals out of a game into your elo calculation, instead of just one win/loss condition. They already do that for catching cheaters in chess. In essence, you treat the positions that occur in a game not as a logical sequence, but as a series of multiple-choice questions.
- mapt 11y agoColor me skeptical. The value of things like Elo is they provide a ramping scale with some degree of statistical significance, because they cover play over many games. I don't think a computer is going to be able to extrapolate with a high degree of confidence, because human play is variable from game to game and long-run strategies are non-obvious constructs for the computer. You're thinking in terms of 'The AI has solved Go mathematically', but that's not the case; Just because you can run a Monte Carlo best-choice-picker/guesser algorithm doesn't mean you can meaningfully rank how deliberate choices compare with each other more than a few plays away.
- eru 11y agoLong-run strategies are a human crutch. It's easiest to see when you solved a game mathematically, that you can just value positions independently. Go hasn't been solved to that level, but it's apparently been solved to higher level than humans ever reached. I am just parroting http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12677/763 http://www.uschess.org/content/view/12677/763 here, so I might as well quote: "To catch an alleged cheater, Regan takes a set of chess positions played by a single player—ideally 200 or more but his analysis can work with as few as 20—and treats each position like a question on a multiple-choice exam. The score on this exam translates to an Elo rating, a score Regan calls an Intrinsic Performance Rating (IPR)." This approach also allows to score historic players absolutely, instead of only relatively and trying to find sets of overlapping lifetimes until we reach the modern age.
- beatpanda 11y agoHere's a related and possibly more interesting question nobody seems to be asking -- in the age of robotics and artificial intelligence, does exploitation of workers and environmental catastrophe at the point of extraction of the materials we use to build computers and robots have a future? And if the answer is yes, why isn't anyone trying to use robots for that purpose?
- eru 11y agoPeople are automating resource gathering all the time. See eg http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...
- bitmapbrother 11y agoThis article is trying to answer a question no one asked. Of course Go prodigies will always have a future regardless of how well computers become at playing Go. When we start handling out championships, officially ranking computer programs and awarding prize money to them then we can have this conversation.
- jtth 11y agoThis is stupid.
- itsAllTrue 11y agoForgive me, but the headline, all by itself, left me thinking: Why are there so many young programmers adopting the Go programming language, throughout Asia, exclusively?
- chj 11y agoI wouldn't write those professionals off so easily. People barely knows AlphaGo until now. Once they start learning about AlphaGo's behaviors, they may be able to come out with new tactics. No doubt it will be a collective effort from the Go community, no one can beat the machine alone.
- grondilu 11y agoIt's true that humans should be allowed a rematch. And all professionals Go players could be playing in concert. Hell, Google should organize a "AlphaGo against the world" on internet.
- nindalf 11y agoCan't wait for Twitch Plays Go.
- aws_ls 11y agoImpressive. You wrote this comment, well before the 4th match results, which Lee Sedol won.
- apalmer 11y agoI would think this has to be a serious inflection point... As far learning how to think, strategize, competing with friends, etc go will remain. However for the extremely few say 100 really top level players, this has to in a way be disheartening... at that level its about competition, and the will, discipline and ability to advance... it has to be disheartening to know you will never be the best. Its kind of like climbing mount Everest 'because it was there'. Its just not 'there' anymore.
- taneq 11y agoIt'd be like climbing Everest on foot in the shadow of a cable car which runs to the top. Still a clallenge, but one that feels pointless.
- locusm 11y agoI would love to see AlphaGo vs itself.
- sandGorgon 11y agoThis reminds me of the 1947 story "With Folded Hands" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands - where a post apocalyptic future is the consequence of full automation and robotics . people have no purpose left.
- ericschmidt 11y agoLockhart killing the game. Watch out, Sergey
- golergka 11y agoTL;DR: several personal stories about people who invested a lot of time in the game, general information about go in general as well as what's going on right now, and finally, a semi-answer with a quote: “A dolphin swims faster than Michael Phelps, but we still want to see how fast he can go,” Lockhart said. “We’re humans and we care about other humans and what they can do.” Too many words, too little information for one article.
- geebee 11y agoI'm pretty sure humans will not stop playing go at intensely high levels just because a computer can beat them. The analogy to chess is an interesting one, though, not quite as straightforward as it may seem. Chess, when it was first conquered by computers a couple of decades ago, was a triumph of computer vs human, sure, but in such a different way from the way humans play it. Chess is amenable to brute force search in a way that go isn't (though I understand the chess programs really aren't pure brute force), but human chess players don't (as far as I know) really don't play chess in a brute force way, they rely in intuition, experience, and even a bit of gambling and hedging whether their opponent will "see" or "realize" the strategy in time. As a result, the chess programs were winning through a "reasoning" process that was very different from what you experience watching people play the game. Something very different is going on when humans play, which makes it interesting - in that sense you can sort of dismiss the machine as playing a different game, albeit one with the same board, pieces, and rules. Instead, it's a giant calculation that happens to beat the more intuitive approach once you can search and score X positions per second through an entirely alternate approach to the game. This current breakthrough with go sounds different, in that it may mean that computers now play go in a way that is much more similar to the way humans play it (it would be interesting to see if a chess program designed more like the go program would have a huge edge over the brute force search approach). Or, if not the same, perhaps a way that is equally if not more interesting. I'm kind of bummed that I'm out of my depth on this one (I don't know go or chess well enough to really say), but it's an interesting question.