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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


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:20PM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:20PM (#515151)

    Agreed. Chess-playing AIs have been able to wipe the floor with Grandmasters for decades now, and yet people still play Chess regularly. Ditto checkers, Risk, Monopoly, and any number of other games that have had well-developed AIs built for them. Heck, the vast majority of people playing any game against an AI are probably playing at a low-to-medium difficulty simply because that's what offers a decent balance of challenge and chance of victory for them - the fact that a super-sophisticaed AI somewhere in the world can consistently defeat the best human players is utterly irrelevant to anyone except the AI developers themselves, and perhaps the top-ranking Go players who can now find a decent AI opponent at 2am when they can't sleep.

    The entire concept is only a few spli hairs from saying "New Sexbot design manages to consistently outperform best human lovers, humans expected to stop having sex in response."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:23PM (#515155)

    I can seriously fuck up the chess AI on beginner level. It makes me feel so manly and tough. I've also got a collection of female sex bots that TOTALLY worship my cock. It's insane.