6 ms·

8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo

79 points by rayshan 2y ago

dumpsterlid 2y ago
[flagged]
- huytersd 2y ago
  What dysfunctional products. I use atleast 7 Google products during my day and they all work really well and for free.
  - imiric 2y ago
    > for free Strange to see this popular misconception on HN. Adtech products are certainly not free/gratis. You're paying with your data, usage and attention. They're extracting far more value out of you than you do from their products.
    - sfn42 2y ago
      Extracting makes it sound like they're taking something from me. From my perspective they're not. If they can make value from shit I do that's great, at least someone's getting something out of my procrastination. And I get to use neat stuff like youtube, Google Docs etc without paying any money. Sounds like a win win to me.
- brainwad 2y ago
  > Literally Everybody Not In The Bubble Of Working At Google Trust me, Googlers would like our products to not suck, too.
  - dumpsterlid 2y ago
    [dead]
dumbfounder 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
I thought it would be an easy victory I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore. I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions today. For example with self-driving. Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much interested in talks about licensing FSD because they don't think it can work. In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore.
- svachalek 2y ago
  > In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore. That's what they said 10 years ago. Sooner or later people will say it and be right, but the last few percent of any problem is a lot harder than people give it credit for. It may not be that hard to stay in a lane or write a little code, and that may look like it's doing most of the job, but those common tasks are just the easy part.
  - ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
    10 years ago, a lot of FSD was still manually written code. Manually written code gets harder and harder to improve, the larger the codebase. Now it is all NNs and therefore will scale with more data and more compute. Which is increasing exponentially. So far it seems like they are not hitting diminishing returns.
    - Buttons840 2y ago
      Yeah, and plain Q learning is able to iteratively improve a policy in any environment. Every single loop leading to improvement, and yet it hasn't really solved much of anything since the 60s (just some toy problems). My point being, we don't know where the asymptote lies. Computers have had self improving algorithms since the 60s, and people have been making the same bold claims, like you, that because an iterative process for improvement has been discovered, we're close to super human AI since the 60s too.
  - 2y ago
tromp 2y ago
> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations. The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to be exact [1]: 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935 Indeed far larger than the ~ 4.8 x 10^44 legal chess positions [2], that is in between the number of legal 9x9 and 10x10 Go positions. [1] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html [2] https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm
- HackerThemAll 2y ago
  All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go. Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess. For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.
  - tromp 2y ago
    Or one could say that Go is about as complex as 4 simultaneous games of go, with the number of positions being about the 4th power.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. I think that using these numbers as as stand-ins for difficulty is itself a form of obfuscation. The truth is that, despite the massive number of potential board states, Chess and Go are some of the easier games to solve, thanks to their nature (perfect information, zero randomness, alternating turns where each player plays exactly one move). And trying to use board states as a proxy for complexity and complexity as a proxy for difficulty doesn't generalize to other categories of games. Compared to Go, what's the complexity of Sid Meier's Civilization? If I devise a game of Candyland with 10^180 squares, is that harder to devise an optimal strategy for than Go just because it has more board states? The reason that we're still using board states as a proxy for difficulty is because historically our metric of "this is difficult for a computer to play" was based on the size of the decision tree and thus the feasibility of locally searching it up to a given depth. In the age of machine learning, surely we can come up with a more interesting metric?
bevekspldnw 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Pet_Ant 2y ago
I know there are Go channels in Korea for watching professional matches... are there any for watching AIs face off against each other?
- apetresc 2y ago
  Virtually every public Go server at the moment, unfortunately.
- mNovak 2y ago
  Michael Redmond, to my knowledge the highest ranked English-speaking Go player, does youtube analyses of Go matches, including Pro vs AI games, which are very insightful.
rhaps0dy 2y ago
Great PR for Google from Lee! It totally isn't mostly for advancing Google's commercial interests, the bottom line being: "I believe that humans can partner with AI and make great progress. As long as we can set clear principles and standards for it, I am quite optimistic about the future of AI technology in our daily lives." I hope he got paid well.
bnprks 2y ago
To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in my mind. I haven't played Go in a while, but I'm kind of excited to try going back to use the KataGo-based analysis/training tools that exist now. [1]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo
alas44 2y ago
Google's documentary on AlphaGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)
- RetroTechie 2y ago
  +1 What stuck with me is Lee Sedol's strong emotional reaction, leading him to leave professional Go playing. It's understandable he didn't expect AlphaGo to be that strong. Or that (for him) losing to a machine took the 'soul' out of the game. But come on... I've been cornered by Pac-Man ghosts many times. That doesn't make Pac-Man less fun to play. Nor does losing to the crude 'AI' steering those ghosts. Instead, you play, aim for a high score, see how long you can survive, how many levels you can complete, or how many fruits & ghosts you can eat in a game. And (if you care) compare how those 'metrics' stack up against other players. If a machine with superhuman Go-playing ability isn't fun or challenging, then stick to human opponents. Of course it's his views and choices, and I respect that. But other than providing extremely challenging opponent, I don't see how human-beating machine would take the fun out of a game. Rather the opposite: new tactics, new insights, a raised upper bound for a Go player's strength (human or otherwise), etc.
  - QuantumGood 2y ago
    Some people connect their ego tightly to their accomplishments. Others are emotionally fragile to what they perceive as negative experiences. Some achieve great things by what they perceive as great sacrifices, and have a lot of difficulty maintaining what they have achieved. Some at or near the top of a field perceive their accomplishment primarily as being "best", and are consumed with angst when they are no longer best. The public explanation they give may not describe how they are different than someone trying to understand. Open up how you frame personality types and life experiences, and you can think of possibilities beyond "I don't see how".
    - tasuki 2y ago
      There's a plausible explanation even without ego/emotions: In the world of go, there was an obsession with finding "the perfect move". This was a significant motivation for the players. That is now completely gone: if you want to find the perfect move, ask a computer.
efrank3 2y ago
I can't believe it's been 8 years.

79 points by rayshan 2y ago

dumpsterlid 2y ago

[flagged]

huytersd 2y ago
What dysfunctional products. I use atleast 7 Google products during my day and they all work really well and for free.
- imiric 2y ago
  > for free Strange to see this popular misconception on HN. Adtech products are certainly not free/gratis. You're paying with your data, usage and attention. They're extracting far more value out of you than you do from their products.
  - sfn42 2y ago
    Extracting makes it sound like they're taking something from me. From my perspective they're not. If they can make value from shit I do that's great, at least someone's getting something out of my procrastination. And I get to use neat stuff like youtube, Google Docs etc without paying any money. Sounds like a win win to me.
brainwad 2y ago
> Literally Everybody Not In The Bubble Of Working At Google Trust me, Googlers would like our products to not suck, too.
- dumpsterlid 2y ago
  [dead]

dumbfounder 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago

I thought it would be an easy victory I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete anymore. I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions today. For example with self-driving. Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much interested in talks about licensing FSD because they don't think it can work. In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore.

svachalek 2y ago
> In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers anymore. That's what they said 10 years ago. Sooner or later people will say it and be right, but the last few percent of any problem is a lot harder than people give it credit for. It may not be that hard to stay in a lane or write a little code, and that may look like it's doing most of the job, but those common tasks are just the easy part.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  10 years ago, a lot of FSD was still manually written code. Manually written code gets harder and harder to improve, the larger the codebase. Now it is all NNs and therefore will scale with more data and more compute. Which is increasing exponentially. So far it seems like they are not hitting diminishing returns.
  - Buttons840 2y ago
    Yeah, and plain Q learning is able to iteratively improve a policy in any environment. Every single loop leading to improvement, and yet it hasn't really solved much of anything since the 60s (just some toy problems). My point being, we don't know where the asymptote lies. Computers have had self improving algorithms since the 60s, and people have been making the same bold claims, like you, that because an iterative process for improvement has been discovered, we're close to super human AI since the 60s too.
- 2y ago

tromp 2y ago

> Go is a deeply complex strategic game — famously far more complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible board configurations. The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to be exact [1]: 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935 Indeed far larger than the ~ 4.8 x 10^44 legal chess positions [2], that is in between the number of legal 9x9 and 10x10 Go positions. [1] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html [2] https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm

HackerThemAll 2y ago
All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go. Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess. For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.
- tromp 2y ago
  Or one could say that Go is about as complex as 4 simultaneous games of go, with the number of positions being about the 4th power.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. I think that using these numbers as as stand-ins for difficulty is itself a form of obfuscation. The truth is that, despite the massive number of potential board states, Chess and Go are some of the easier games to solve, thanks to their nature (perfect information, zero randomness, alternating turns where each player plays exactly one move). And trying to use board states as a proxy for complexity and complexity as a proxy for difficulty doesn't generalize to other categories of games. Compared to Go, what's the complexity of Sid Meier's Civilization? If I devise a game of Candyland with 10^180 squares, is that harder to devise an optimal strategy for than Go just because it has more board states? The reason that we're still using board states as a proxy for difficulty is because historically our metric of "this is difficult for a computer to play" was based on the size of the decision tree and thus the feasibility of locally searching it up to a given depth. In the age of machine learning, surely we can come up with a more interesting metric?

bevekspldnw 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Pet_Ant 2y ago

I know there are Go channels in Korea for watching professional matches... are there any for watching AIs face off against each other?

apetresc 2y ago
Virtually every public Go server at the moment, unfortunately.
mNovak 2y ago
Michael Redmond, to my knowledge the highest ranked English-speaking Go player, does youtube analyses of Go matches, including Pro vs AI games, which are very insightful.

rhaps0dy 2y ago

Great PR for Google from Lee! It totally isn't mostly for advancing Google's commercial interests, the bottom line being: "I believe that humans can partner with AI and make great progress. As long as we can set clear principles and standards for it, I am quite optimistic about the future of AI technology in our daily lives." I hope he got paid well.

bnprks 2y ago

To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in my mind. I haven't played Go in a while, but I'm kind of excited to try going back to use the KataGo-based analysis/training tools that exist now. [1]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

alas44 2y ago

Google's documentary on AlphaGo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)

RetroTechie 2y ago
+1 What stuck with me is Lee Sedol's strong emotional reaction, leading him to leave professional Go playing. It's understandable he didn't expect AlphaGo to be that strong. Or that (for him) losing to a machine took the 'soul' out of the game. But come on... I've been cornered by Pac-Man ghosts many times. That doesn't make Pac-Man less fun to play. Nor does losing to the crude 'AI' steering those ghosts. Instead, you play, aim for a high score, see how long you can survive, how many levels you can complete, or how many fruits & ghosts you can eat in a game. And (if you care) compare how those 'metrics' stack up against other players. If a machine with superhuman Go-playing ability isn't fun or challenging, then stick to human opponents. Of course it's his views and choices, and I respect that. But other than providing extremely challenging opponent, I don't see how human-beating machine would take the fun out of a game. Rather the opposite: new tactics, new insights, a raised upper bound for a Go player's strength (human or otherwise), etc.
- QuantumGood 2y ago
  Some people connect their ego tightly to their accomplishments. Others are emotionally fragile to what they perceive as negative experiences. Some achieve great things by what they perceive as great sacrifices, and have a lot of difficulty maintaining what they have achieved. Some at or near the top of a field perceive their accomplishment primarily as being "best", and are consumed with angst when they are no longer best. The public explanation they give may not describe how they are different than someone trying to understand. Open up how you frame personality types and life experiences, and you can think of possibilities beyond "I don't see how".
  - tasuki 2y ago
    There's a plausible explanation even without ego/emotions: In the world of go, there was an obsession with finding "the perfect move". This was a significant motivation for the players. That is now completely gone: if you want to find the perfect move, ask a computer.

efrank3 2y ago

I can't believe it's been 8 years.