The AlphaGo that beat the 2p European champion five months ago was not as strong as the AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol (9p). I don't think this was just the AlphaGo team throwing more hardware. I think they had been constantly running the self-training during the intervening months so that AlphaGo was improving itself.
If that is so, then the big thing here isn't that AlphaGo is the first AI to win an official match with the currently world's strongest Go player. It's that within less than half a year, AlphaGo was able to learn and grow to go from challenging a 2p to challenging the world's strongest player. Think about that.
I think it's fair to say that in the future, people will look back and wonder how it was possible to live without having a good AI.. similar to how we look past at caveman and wonder how they could live without electricity. AI is really just a tool that we leverage, the same was as we leveraged the wheel or electricity.
Yep. I was just talking with the founder of a startup I work with. His son was born in the past 5 months or so. The son is never going to live in a world that doesn't have deep learning. Like the kids who never knew what the world was like before the smartphone. Like the kids who never knew what the world was like before the web browser.
And AI is just one strand. There are several strands that are as deeply changing, that is happening simultaneously.
I remember someone speaking about the shift between classical hard sci fi and more current sci-fi authors like Neal Stephenson or Peter Hamilton. The classical authors like Heinlein or Asimov might do world building where they just change one thing. What would the world be like if that one thing changed? After a certain point though, things were changing so fast that later authors didn't do that. There were too many things that changed at the same time.
Here's a video where teens discover Windows 95: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ucCxtgN6sc It gives a visual analogy of what you're saying about the new generation and AI!
Correct. It played like a top level human player, pretty evenly matched with Lee Sedol. AlphaGo from yesterday would have wiped the floor with AlphaGo from 6 months ago.
Various commentators mentioned how both players, human and synthetic, made a few mistakes. Even I caught a slow move made by the AI. So whether Lee Sedol was at the top of his peformance, or not, is a bit of a debate. But the AI was clearly on the same level, whatever that means.
It was an intense fight throughout the game, with both players making bold moves and taking risks. Fantastic show.
That could be true, but according to some articles I was reading at the time (sorry no src), the nature of their engine is that you cannot determine just how strong it is by playing one game because it plays to "just win", and not to win by as much as possible (paraphrase). So maybe it was barely good enough to be 2p, maybe it was already much stronger.
6 months ago it was clearly stronger than Fan Hui 2p. You don't beat someone at that level 5-0 without being consistently stronger.
Fan Hui said the machine played extremely consistently 6 months ago. He said playing the computer was "like pushing against a wall" - just very strong, very consistent performance.
This is misleading. AlphaGo beat a 2p player five months ago. Now it has beaten a 9p player. That tells is nothing about it's improvement in the intervening time. Given only this information, however unlikely, AlphaGo could have actually been stronger before.
Replying to scarmig, No. Player A may consistently beat Player B who may consistently beat Player C who consistently beats Player A.
There are different strategies depending upon how much emphasis is placed upon early territorial gains as opposed to "influence" which is used for later later territorial gains.
Similarly, playing "passive" moves that make territory without starting a "fight" versus agressively contesting for every piece of territory available.
It's more that there are different styles of winning, and a human will tend to specialize in such a style. But generally, someone who is consistently stronger will win over someone who is consistently weaker, regardless of style.
The AlphaGo that beat the 2p European champion five months ago was not as strong as the AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol (9p). I don't think this was just the AlphaGo team throwing more hardware. I think they had been constantly running the self-training during the intervening months so that AlphaGo was improving itself.
If that is so, then the big thing here isn't that AlphaGo is the first AI to win an official match with the currently world's strongest Go player. It's that within less than half a year, AlphaGo was able to learn and grow to go from challenging a 2p to challenging the world's strongest player. Think about that.