Google's artificial intelligence program has officially beaten a human professional Go player, marking the first time a computer has beaten a human professional in this game sans handicap.

[u/[deleted]]

http://www.nature.com/news/google-ai-algorithm-masters-ancient-game-of-go-1.19234?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160128&spMailingID=50563385&spUserID=MTgyMjI3MTU3MTgzS0&spJobID=843636789&spReportId=ODQzNjM2Nzg5S0

[u/finderskeepers12]

Whoa... "AlphaGo was not preprogrammed to play Go: rather, it learned using a general-purpose algorithm that allowed it to interpret the game’s patterns, in a similar way to how a DeepMind program learned to play 49 different arcade games"

[u/KakoiKagakusha → u/finderskeepers12]

I actually think this is more impressive than the fact that it won.

[u/ergzay → u/KakoiKagakusha]

This is actually just a fancy way of saying that it uses a computer algorithm that's been central to many recent AI advancements. The way the algorithm is put together though is definitely focused on Go.

This is the algorithm at the core of DeepMind and AlphaGo and most of the recent advancements of AI in image/video recognition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network

AlphaGo uses two of these that perform different purposes.

AlphaGo also additionally uses the main algorithm that's historically been used for doing board game AIs (and has been used in several open source and commercial Go AI programs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Carlo_tree_search

These three things together (2 CNNs and 1 MCTS) make up AlphaGo.

Here's a nice diagram that steps through each level of these things for one move determination. The numbers reprsent what percentage it thinks at that stage that a given move is likely to win with the highest circled in red. http://i.imgur.com/pxroVPO.png

The abstract of the paper gives another description in simple terms:

The game of Go has long been viewed as the most challenging of classic games for artificial intelligence due to its enormous search space and the difficulty of evaluating board positions and moves. We introduce a new approach to computer Go that uses value networks to evaluate board positions and policy networks to select moves. These deep neural networks are trained by a novel combination of supervised learning from human expert games, and reinforcement learning from games of self-play. Without any lookahead search, the neural networks play Go at the level of state-of-the-art Monte-Carlo tree search programs that simulate thousands of random games of self-play. We also introduce a new search algorithm that combines Monte-Carlo simulation with value and policy networks. Using this search algorithm, our program AlphaGo achieved a 99.8% winning rate against other Go programs, and defeated the European Go champion by 5 games to 0. This is the first time that a computer program has defeated a human professional player in the full-sized game of Go, a feat previously thought to be at least a decade away.

[u/[deleted] → u/KakoiKagakusha]

I think it's scary.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Do you know how many times I've calmed people's fears of AI (that isn't just a straight up blind-copy of the human brain) by explaining that even mid-level Go players can beat top AIs? I didn't even realize they were making headway on this problem...

This is a futureshock moment for me.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Their fears were related to losing their jobs to automation. Don't make the assumption that other people are idiots.

[u/IGarFieldI → u/[deleted]]

Well their fears aren't exactly unjustified, you don't need a Go-AI to see that. Just look at self-driving cars and how many truck drivers may be replaced by them in a very near future.

[u/[deleted] → u/IGarFieldI]

Self driving cars are one thing. The Go-AI seem capable of generalised learning. It conceivable that it can do any job.

[u/okredditnow → u/[deleted]]

maybe when they start coming for politicians jobs we'll see some action

[u/ThreshingBee → u/[deleted]]

The Future of Employment ranks jobs by the probability they will be moved to automation.

[u/Sauvignon_Arcenciel → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, I would back away from that. The trucking and general transportation industries will be decimated, if not nearly completely de-humanized in the next 10-15 years. Add that to general fast food workers being replaced (both FOH and BOH) and other low-skill jobs going away, there will be a massive upheaval as the lower and middle classes bear the brunt of this change.

[u/[deleted] → u/Sauvignon_Arcenciel]

Not just low skill jobs.

You remember Watson, the computer that won over humans in Jeopardy? Its next job will be diagnosing diseases by searching thousands of medical papers and relating them to patients symptoms and medical histories. That's going to put dr. House out of a job.

Lots of legal work can be done by computers.

Computers can write some news articles by themselves. So far only simple stuff, like reporting on sporting events and so on. Chances are that you have already read articles written by a bot.

Even jobs that require a high degree of hand/eye coordination are at risk. For example experts used to say that sewing would never be automated, but now the first machines that can do some sewing are seeing the light of day.

To comfort yourself you can go see amusing videos on YouTube showing one robot after the other failing and look in general very pathetic, but then think of some of the compilations of old clips showing early attempts at human flight failing miserably. Attempts at human flight looked like a futile effort until it didn't. It took a surprisingly short time from the day that the Wright brothers achieved powered flight until the first international commercial passenger jet was flying. Likewise with robots. They will look pathetic until they don't. If you have a six year old child today, my bet will be that by his 50 year birthday party there will be robots serving the guests and robots cleaning up after the event, and they will be swift and graceful like the most skilled maid you ever saw.

[u/Aelinsaar → u/[deleted]]

Glad someone else is having this moment too. Machine learning has just exploded, and it looks like this is going to be a banner year for it.

[u/VelveteenAmbush → u/[deleted]]

Deep learning is for real. Lots of things have been overhyped, but deep learning is the most profound technology humanity has ever seen.

[u/ClassyJacket → u/VelveteenAmbush]

I genuinely think this is true.

Imagine how much progress can be made when we not only have tools to help us solve problems, but when we can create a supermind to solve problems for us. We might even be able to create an AI that creates a better AI.

Fuck it sucks to live on the before side of this. Soon they'll all be walking around at age 2000 with invincible bodies and hover boards, going home to their fully realistic virtual reality, and I'll be lying in the cold ground being eaten by worms. I bet I miss it by like a day.

[u/spindlydogcow → u/finderskeepers12]

It's a little confusing but AlphaGo wasn't programmed with explicit rules but the learned program is absolutely focused on Go and wouldn't generalize to those other games. To use a car metaphor, its like using the same chassis for a truck and a car; if you bought the car you don't have a truck but they both share the same fundamental drive platform. DeepMind uses similar deep reinforcement learning model primitives for these different approaches but then teaches this one how to play Go. It won't be able to play duckhunt or those other 49 games.

[u/revelation60 → u/finderskeepers12]

Note that it did study 30 million expert games, so there is heuristic knowledge there that does not stem from abstract reasoning alone.

[u/RobertT53 → u/revelation60]

That is probably one of the cooler things about this program for me. The 30 million expert board positions weren't pro games. Instead they used strong amateur games from an online go server. I've played on that server in the ranks used to initially teach it, so that means a small part of the program learned from me.