The headline doesn't do justice to what he said. He actually said that he thinks after watching the current games he has a 60% chance of winning, but that AlphaGo will eventually beat him (perhaps in months, perhaps a few years).
The headline makes it sound like he's being super-arrogant, but his actual words tell a very different story.
He said both, if you can read his posts on Weibo (rougly Chinese Twitter). And he said those two points in separate posts, so the headline quote not taking words out of context. It's Jie himself who used the clickbait strategy in the first place and the media happily followed :)
Edit: I just looked up his Weibo, and it turns out that he said only what is quoted in the headline on Weibo; that deeper analysis was, presumably, from a later interview which he didn't post on Weibo at all.
Also, I don't think it sounds super arrogant. The fact that AlphaGo beats someone beaten by Ke Jie 8 times out of 10 doesn't say enough about AlphaGo vs. Ke Jie. As Jie himself pointed out, eventually AlphaGo will be able to beat him, but claiming that it cannot do this now sounds pretty safe to me.
> The fact that AlphaGo beats someone beaten by Ke Jie 8 times out of 10 doesn't say enough about AlphaGo vs. Ke Jie.
8:2 implies the difference between them isn't so large. (If someone only beat me 8:2, I'd expect a professional to beat them 10:0.) Do we have any particular reason to think that AlphaGo would fall within that narrow skill band?
E.g. if Google specifically challenged Lee, thinking that AG had just about passed his level.
Alternatively by looking at the games and saying "Ke beat Lee by more than AG did, so Ke will beat AG as well". But many people have pointed out that AG doesn't optimize for winning by the greatest amount, so this probably isn't very informative.
Alternatively if AG's playstyle is strong against Lee but weak against Ke. But could Ke know that? AG's only played against two high-profile opponents, if it can adapt its playstyle we won't have seen that in action.
For people outside of Go community, Ke Jie is the new star of Go, currently Jie's Elo rating is #1, http://www.goratings.org/, Lee Sedol is #4. Media touted Lee Sedol as the greatest player of past decade, it was true couple years ago but Lee Sedol has been clearly in decline in recent years (as seen in the Elo rating).
2) Ke Jie is 19, at the peak age of his game. Lee Sedol is 33 and is seemingly in decline in his game, hence the 2:8 record vs. Ke Jie.
3) Ke Jie probably wanted to be challenged since he is the current world's #1 Go player. Sure there aren't much differences in terms of skill levels between top Pro 9 dan players but challenging a current world's #4 player is different from challenging a current world #1 player, isn't it?
It's a shame that the Western world doesn't know Ke Jie well(as his wikipedia page has very limited info and his award records.)[1] But these are moot points. After the 2nd defeat, it's increasingly clear that AlphaGo will defeat human player - it's a matter of time or a matter of a couple more games.
Not so sure about the extra mile. It could happen that the AI couldn't be able to go beyond a certain level. That is this AI could be walled. We have a wonderful opportunity to see an example in which current AI is measured to be near but not far from best human competence.
> It could happen that the AI couldn't be able to go beyond a certain level.
That's your wishful thinking.
As we've seen the matches with Fan Hui in the past, unfortunately and fortunately, the CNN will improve drastically game after game and making less mistakes whereas human always do at a certain level.
Another big point I want to point out is human emotion and state of the mind. With 0:2, Lee Sedol lost his confidence ("speechless" in his own words) [1] and quite possibly increasing fear of losing in a landslide 0:5. Losing confidence and fear of losing are VERY TERRIBLE things in any
competitive sports.
it is very interesting to measure at what rate AI improves. If the AI can improve a lot, a very interesting problem is to develop a scale or elo for measuring this progress. I am more interested in what lesson we can take home from this match, I don't have a wish here. We have many thinks to learn about this. In a situation of great uncertainty about the pace at with AI can improve its capabilities, measuring the velocity or rate of change can gives a hint about the future and applications of this new technology.
I prefer the marketing narrative of beating a top pro then challenging the #1...or better yet have said #1 more or less ask for the challenge himself.
It's more impact than going for the #1 directly and also allows for some extra optimization cycles.
Transitivity doesn't necessarily apply in most of these cases. Just because A can beat B and B can beat C, that doesn't mean A can beat C.
That's especially true when one of your players is a robot, which learns in a different way than humans. Yes, it's running a neural network, but a neural network still isn't a brain. Every person's brain is slightly differently organized on the neural level. On the other hand, every NN is running more or less the same structure and backpropagation algorithms. If you can find where those algorithms are strategically weak, you'll be able to beat them consistently.
The actually values in the NN depends on both the algorithms and the data input during training phase. You cannot find how these algorithms are strategically weak unless you've seen all of what NN have seen.
Not necessarily. Unlike the human brain, NNs are extremely organized. They can change their weights but they cannot easily change their fundamental structure. Their organization can make them bad at certain tasks.
For example a CNN does well at object recognition from photos, but does poorly at recognizing a pencil sketch of an object it hasn't previously seen a sketch of. Or recognizing a scene at night that it has only seen daytime photos of. Those tasks, humans do very well because the trained human brain combines cultural understanding, physics intuition, and visual cortex at the same time, and would be able to use this to their advantage to easily beat, say, a massively trained CNN image recognition program that lacks cultural understanding and physics intuition.
Some other more complex NN structure may be able to tackle these kind of tasks, but as long as its neural structure is rigid, it will have yet other deficiencies. The human brain is still able to structurally adapt in ways that NNs cannot, yet.
"8:2 implies the difference between them isn't so large. (If someone only beat me 8:2, I'd expect a professional to beat them 10:0.)" Not sure I follow the logic here. They're both professionals, and one was much better than the other in the 10 games they played!
My point is that 8:2 isn't much better. Not compared to the range of skills available. If someone beats me 8:2, that puts fairly strong bounds on their skill level, such that most players would either beat both of us or lose to both of us.
Another way to look at it, if Ke beats Lee 8:2 then Lee-plus-four-stones probably beats Ke more than half the time. (I'm pretty confident about four stones; I suspect two or three would suffice.) Four stones is significant, but it's still a fairly narrow gap to say "I think AG falls within this skill range" until you've seen it lose a game.
I get your point, but four stones is beyond ridiculous. Two stones is already a really large handicap. At two stones, Ke would have no chance whatsoever.
Games at this level are decided by a few points. The closer two players come to optimal play, the harder it is to be very much more efficient than your opponent over the course of a game. To be so much more efficient, at this level, that you could overcome a 4 stone handicap is unthinkable.
I would very much like to see computers improve to the level that they could take on a top professional giving a 2 stone handicap. That would be a sight!
Ke Jie would lose to or at best be even with Lee Sedol with one stone handicap (taking white with no komi) because his ELO is not THAT much higher. Since Lee Sedol has a better record against Park Junghwan who also has wins vs. Ke Jie etc. ELO is a better predictor than just 10 games in a vacuum.
I agree with what you say, but disagree with what I think you mean.
Weaker players are more inconsistent. Someone else says Lee-plus-two stones beats Ke. I don't think me-plus-two-stones dominates someone who beats me 8:2.
So with weaker players, 8:2 is consistent with a wider range of skill gaps (measured in handicap stones). It's consistent with one player being only a little better, and it's consistent with one player being a lot better.
With two of the best players in the world, 8:2 isn't consistent with more than two stones difference between them.
So in this case, 8:2 rules out a lot of possible skill gaps, which does say a lot; in the same way that "beats me 8:2" says a lot more than "beats me 10:0".
(Alternatively we can measure skill gaps in points. Games between weak players will often be decided by tens of points. Games between strong players will be decided by a handful. 8:2 between Lee and Ke suggests their points gap is smaller than between two amateurs who get 8:2.)
Even if he did say that and mean it, it's probably natural and healthy for someone in his position to have a psychological bias towards predicting their own victory. To be an elite competitor, I think you have to stay in the mindset of winning. Thinking about losing too much can take away a little bit of edge (provided you don't get arrogant and lazy)
I can only agree, the headline is absolutely horrible, the actual quotes are way more nuanced and importantly expose downright eagerness to try himself against AlphaGo.
He's effectively saying as an outsider that he would have won the match just played. But he has no way of knowing that. It's easy to see mistakes from the outside. Seems like hubris to me.
Also it's very likely if the human played stronger in the last match, the computer also would have stepped up. Computers tend to sacrifice points (i.e. "big leads") for assured victory, so unless the human is stronger than the computer, you cannot know it's true potential.
That's a common strategy in human game play and sports as well. It has been observed many times that humans on their own in regular sports do much worse than doing the same in competition against a somewhat stronger party. As they say: one boat is a cruise, two boats, it's a race.
I assumed that, since this has been in the news, he's promoting himself to be next in line to take on the computer. The purpose being the publicity and earnings associated with participating in an event like this (it's not often Go makes it into the mainstream media).
This is very interesting. We have a way to test what he say. A match between the machine and this player with the game in the situation he describes. If he defeats the machine he proves that the machine game is nothing beyond our capabilities.
> but that AlphaGo will eventually beat him (perhaps in months, perhaps a few years
I think that part is irrelevant because I think everyone knows that would be the case - that in a few months or years, the AI would exponentially improve.
This is assuming the limitation is mostly processing power.
From what I've read, more processing power would allow the AI to calculate possible outcomes for each move further into the future but that does not mean the AI's overall success rate will go up at the same rate.
The headline makes it sound like he's being super-arrogant, but his actual words tell a very different story.