Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the would-rather-play-go-fish dept.

A year after AlphaGo beat the top Go player Lee Sedol, it is facing the world's current top player Ke Jie in a set of three matches (AlphaGo played five matches against Lee Sedol and won 4-1). AlphaGo has won the first match, so Ke Jie must win the next two matches in order to defeat AlphaGo. Although AlphaGo beat Ke Jie by only half a point in this match, edging out an opponent by a small margin is a legitimate strategy:

Ke Jie tried to use a strategy he's seen AlphaGo use online before, but that didn't work out for him in the end. Jie should've probably known that AlphaGo must have already played such moves against itself when training, which should also mean that it should know how to "defeat itself" in such scenarios.

A more successful strategy against AlphaGo may be one that AlphaGo hasn't seen before. However, considering Google has shown it millions of matches from top players, coming up with such "unseen moves" may be difficult, especially for a human player who can't watch millions of hours of video to train.

However, according to Hassabis, the AlphaGo AI also seems to have "liberated" Go players when thinking about Go strategies, by making them think that no move is impossible. This could lead to Go players trying out more innovative moves in the future, but it remains to be seen if Ke Jie will try that strategy in future matches against AlphaGo.

Although Google hasn't mentioned anything about this yet, it's likely that both AlphaGo's neural networks as well as the hardware doing all the computations have received significant upgrades from last year. Google recently introduced the Cloud TPU, its second-generation "Tensor Processing Unit," which should have not only have much faster inference performance, but now it comes with high training performance, too. As Google previously used the TPUs to power AlphaGo, it may have also used the next-gen versions to power AlphaGo in the match against Ke Jie.

Along with the Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo matches, there will also be a match between five human players and one AlphaGo instance, as well as a "Pair Go" in which two human players will face each other while assisted by two AlphaGo instances. This intended to demonstrate how Go could continue to exist even after Go-playing AI can routinely beat human players.

Also at NPR.

Previously:
Google DeepMind's AlphaGo Beats "Go" Champion Using Neural Networks
AlphaGo Cements Dominance Over Humanity, Wins Best-Out-of-5 Against Go Champion
AlphaGo Wins Game 5, Wins Challenge Match 4-1 vs. Lee Sedol
AlphaGo Continues to Crush Human Go Players


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:29PM (1 child)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:29PM (#514797)

    From reading the summary I thought the computer assistance would be in the style of a helper you could consult at any time, but TFA states it's more of a tag-team system:

    Pair Go - a game of Go between two human players who will be assisted by two different AlphaGo instances. The humans will alternate their moves with their AlphaGo assistants.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:13PM

    by FatPhil (863) <reversethis-{if.fdsa} {ta} {tnelyos-cp}> on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:13PM (#514837) Homepage

    On the assumption that the humans are significantly worse than alphago, then this gives an advantage to the human who plays first, as alphago gets to get the upper hand first.

    abABabABabABabABabABabAB
      ^   ^   ^   ^   ^   ^   at this point, aA has the advantage, as alphago A has played more of the moves than alphago B.
       ^   ^   ^   ^   ^   ^  at this point, bB has only caught up, bB never gets the change to pull ahead.

    A better sequence of play would be:

    abABaBAbabABaBAbabABaBAb
      ^       ^       ^       at this point, aA has the advantage as alphago A has played more of the moves than alphago B
       ^       ^       ^      at this point, bB has only caught up
         ^       ^       ^    at this point, bB has the advantage, as alphago B has played more of the moves than alphago A
          ^       ^       ^   at this point, aA has only caught up

    That's not perfect, as aA gets the play order advantage earlier, and bB plays catchup on the number of times its had the play order advantage, but never draws ahead, the alphago plays should really be ABBABAABBAABABBA... (fractally). Which gives you something more like:

    abABaBAb aBAbabAB aBAbabAB abABaBAb aBAbabAB abABaBAb abABaBAb aBAbabAB ....

    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves