AlphaGo Beats Top Player at Go - Share Your Thoughts

[fluidistic]

That's not a good example because Nakamura is not an experienced centaur. The domain of postal chess, which is all centaurs (officially allowed and required now) proves on a regular basis that anyone only using today's latest program is slaughtered by players combining their intelligence with a program. Not a single such tournament has been won by someone just taking machine moves (and there are always people trying that, with the latest and greatest engines.)

This is just wrong. See above.

I stand corrected about correspondence chess. Even people under 2000 elo can indeed beat the strongest programs under such time controls and liberty to use any program, etc.
I do maintain my claim on the progress in elo of programs, I don't see what's wrong with it (yet at least).

Edit: I am not sure how such weak chess players manage to beat the strongest programs. One guess that I have is that they use multi pv to see the best moves according to a strong engine, and with another computer they investigate each one of these lines and pick the best. In fact no chess knowledge is required to do that, a script could do it.

 

[PAllen]

I stand corrected about correspondence chess. Even people under 2000 elo can indeed beat the strongest programs under such time controls and liberty to use any program, etc.
I do maintain my claim on the progress in elo of programs, I don't see what's wrong with it (yet at least).

Edit: I am not sure how such weak chess players manage to beat the strongest programs. One guess that I have is that they use multi pv to see the best moves according to a strong engine, and with another computer they investigate each one of these lines and pick the best. In fact no chess knowledge is required to do that, a script could do it.

The winning correspondence players don't just do this. An example where expert (but not world class) knowledge helps is early endgame phase. With tablebases, computers have perfect knowledge of up to 6 piece endings. However, they have no knowledge of types of rook endings with e.g. one or two pawn advantage, that are drawn when there are more than 6 pieces (pawns and kings included). Thus, a computer with a pawn advantage will not know how to avoid such endings (thus allowing a centaur to draw), and a computer with the disadvantage may unnecessarily lose to a centaur by not seeking such a position. You need a lot less than grandmaster knowledge to push programs in the right direction in such cases.

Rather than being exotically rare, such endgames are perhaps the most common type.

 

[Aufbauwerk 2045]

Here are some interesting failures of neural networks.

http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...ence_can_t_recognize_these_simple_images.html

http://gizmodo.com/this-neural-networks-hilariously-bad-image-descriptions-1730844528On the linguistic front, here is today's example from Google Translate. I had a much longer translation cycle using the following English sentence, which failed horribly. So I decided to try what I thought would be much easier: a simple English -> Chinese -> English test. I could come up with a sentence that would be easy for the software to parse, but that's not the point. I'm trying to come up with a sentence that we sloppy humans might read and understand.

English:

It seems highly improbable that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe, since we must assume that the evolution of life elsewhere occurs the same way, solving the same types of problem, as it does here on our home planet.

Chinese人类是宇宙中唯一的智慧生命似乎是不可能的，因为我们必须假设其他地方的生命的演变是同样的方式，解决相同类型的问题，就像在我们的家庭星球上。

English

Humanity is the only intelligent life in the universe that seems impossible because we have to assume that the evolution of life elsewhere is the same way that the same type of problem is solved, just as on our home planet.

 

[AaronK]

If anyone here is interested in hearing more detailed discussion on machine learning with an emphasis towards future AGI (they also talk about AlphaGo in several instances, I believe), check out the conference recently hosted by Max Tegmark. Here's an article explaining more about it: Beneficial AI conference develops ‘Asilomar AI principles’ to guide future AI research. The Future of Life Institute also has a YouTube channel here where more presentations can be viewed from the conference. There were some fantastic talks by some high level contributors to the field like Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Jürgen Schmidhuber.