SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
AI's have beaten the best human players in chess, go, and now poker.
In a landmark achievement for artificial intelligence, a poker bot developed by researchers in Canada and the Czech Republic has defeated several professional players in one-on-one games of no-limit Texas hold'em poker.
Perhaps most interestingly, the academics behind the work say their program overcame its human opponents by using an approximation approach that they compare to "gut feeling."
"If correct, this is indeed a significant advance in game-playing AI," says Michael Wellman, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in game theory and AI. "First, it achieves a major milestone (beating poker professionals) in a game of prominent interest. Second, it brings together several novel ideas, which together support an exciting approach for imperfect-information games."
Source: Poker Is the Latest Game to Fold Against Artificial Intelligence
Is there anything at which AI's won't soon be able to beat humans?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday January 13 2017, @03:11PM
Agreed. This is one of those things that the AI proponents will always question -- they'll say "You're moving the goalposts!" Except my goalpost has always been and will always be the same, and for me true "AI" requires learning and adaptability far beyond any system we're even close to developing. Perhaps on the order of what your average human 5 or 6 year old might be able to do.
I'd strongly encourage people who haven't done so to read Alan Turing's original article on the Turing Test [loebner.net], or at least what's commonly known now as the "Turing Test." While we've had numerous claims to have "passed" the Turing test in the past few years, Turing's actual standard is so high that we're nowhere near it. Read one example dialogue he gives for what he expects for the kind of thing a computer should be able to do when passing the test:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.
Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
No simple chatbot or even the better constructed ones today could come anywhere close to this sort of dialogue. IBM's Watson might be able to locate information if a query is placed in a reasonable form, but it wouldn't be able to catch the subtleties of language and references displayed here.
Until we see that sort of adaptability and fluency, we're not going to be anywhere near "strong AI." And it doesn't necessarily have to be displayed in mastery of English literature or whatever as given in the example here -- the point isn't mastering a particular game or subject matter, but rather flexibility and adaptation that are better markers of intelligence. My pocket calculator can perform "super-human" math; that doesn't make it "artificial intelligence."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday January 13 2017, @03:59PM
What 6-year-old do you know that can do almost flawless adult-vocabulary english->chinese simultrans (voice recognition, translation, voice synthesis, all in real time)?
You're judging AI on <2012 AI, which was a completely different beast, the AI world has literally been turned on its head by deep learning in the last 4 years.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @05:37PM
"...the AI world has literally been turned on its head by deep learning in the last 4 years."
No.
Sorry, it really hasn't.
What has changed is the scale of execution of techniques that have been under discussion for decades.
To use a car analogy, you're proposing that the existence of stretched limousines has literally turned GM on its head. Quite aside from your misuse of the term `literally', the engineering response to a stretched Escalade is to shrug and ask what they did to reinforce the frame, and ask how the handling is, not immediately start simultaneously masturbating and weeping.
Now, if someone came up with an architecture that allowed for arbitrary manifestation of the key features of cognition in an arbitrary context, that would be big news. But that is nowhere near any hint of anything even on the horizon of what these guys have achieved.
At this point, it's pretty much a yawn. Another game beaten, this one an incomplete information one largely driven by statistics. Moving on ...