Announcement of announcement! There will be a press conference in Seoul Feb 22 5pm about the AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol match. They will announce the match location, time controls, and other details.

Source (Korean): http://www.cyberoro.com/news/news_view. ... =1&cmt_n=0

BTW the dates of the matches were announced earlier: March 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15.

More interview from GeekWire.com

“This really is our Deep Blue moment,” Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s president of engineering, said this weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Washington.

Hassabis said most Go players are giving Sedol the edge over AlphaGo. “They give us a less than 5 percent chance of winning … but what they don’t realize is how much our system has improved,” he said. “It’s improving while I’m talking with you.”

For Hassabis, the AlphaGo project is about much more than beating one of the world’s best Go players. The principles that are being put to work in the program can be applied to other AI challenges as well, ranging from programming self-driving cars to creating more humanlike virtual assistants and improving the diagnoses for human diseases.

“We think AI is solving a meta-problem for all these problems,” Hassabis said.

Skynet.

In case you missed it, Fan Hui won all his games at the 1st European Professional Go Championship last weekend:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?EuropeanProfess ... ampionship

even more interview that I found in twitter account that has attend the AAAS meeting

Pro Go players give champ Lee Sedol 97% odds against #AlphaGo (AI). @demishassabis: “Our internal tests are telling us something different”

He also make a headline in the Observer Tech Monthly


In his schedule He'll give a talk at AAAI this Tuesday, and lecture at Oxford University next Friday (no, I'm not his secretary nor stalker)

The paper in Nature only identifies one specific Go thing they code into it, apart from the obvious rules to prevent illegal moves: ladder. This may be to overcome the depth of 20 moves they use in their other analysis.



The one thing they always say is that they can work out that it's improving against itself, and perhaps other bots they're using for calibration purposes.

However, they can't be sure whether it's improving against humans, which is one reason they had the match with Fan Hui.

I don't remember anything about a maximum depth limit when I read the paper, and I couldn't find it when I skimmed it just now. Could you point me to that passage? I always assumed that the depth was dynamic, but that could have been my subconscious adding a bias to my initial read.

EDIT: I just skimmed it again and I think this passage in the "Searching with policy and value networks" section makes it clear that there is no depth limit:


This is MCTS after all.

I would be surprised if DeepMind didn't test AlphaGo anonymously against Tygem 9ds before the match with Lee Sedol. Of course some pro playing on Tygem is not as serious as a real match, but if they are beating top pros on Tygem (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... I4YWEHdYBs for accounts) then they could reasonably feel more confident against Lee. It's worth noting that current #1 Ke Jie played thousands of games on Tygem to get stronger.

I don't think they would do that because users there want to look for any account that can be AlphaGo right now on Tygem, they even mistook Aja Huang (6D programmer from Deepmind team) account to be AlphaGo because that account win against some pro.
I think they've a contract to some pro to work on Deepmind team internally, so they can do something crazy like adding handicap stones to the pro side.

Hmm, I can't find in the paper where I got that impression from. They do talk about searches sometimes being full and sometimes truncated though.

Latest update: For the upcoming match, Demis Hassabis said that the evaluation needs to keep improving by "two notches" (he probably use that as an umbrella term for two stones)

Mathematically agreed, Fan Hui is around 3000 Elo right now, AlphaGo has 80% win rates against Fan Hui which is probably about one stone stronger (3250 ELo), and Lee Sedol is sitting at 3500 Elo. Two stones stronger will make AlphaGo rocketed to 37xx Elo, the highest rank.
I've read the new interview from the Guardian, AlphaGo doesn't even have the Christmas break, poor her.

Finally news from the Deepmind side
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/new ... Cnewslist1

And today Demis Hassabis will also give a lecture at Oxford which can be view livestream for free

http://livestream.com/oxuni/StracheyLec ... isHassabis

(just started here, which is 9:00am PST)

Just a minor point about the match: we don't know what the AlphaGo configuration will be.

The Nature paper shows that they had tested AlphaGo on a larger configuration than the one for the Fan Hui match and this had a 28 point higher ELO rating...

While the entire lecture was great, the specific timeslot in the video where he talks about Go and AlphaGo is from 32:00 - 59:00.

They add Lee Sedol and Facebook's darkforest to the graph but still doesn't fix that sometimes pro are overlaps with 9D, 8D or even 7D

And I also excite about their hint on StarCraft AI project, StarCraft is very big thing in e-sport and is very hot in South Korea so there will be a legendary player, like Lee Sedol of StarCraft, could this be their next target?

Calling it, AlphaStar vs. Flash showmatch, Blizzcon 2017.

I want to name it 'DeepCraft' though, but Deepmind also say that they will tackle a game that has no definitive win/lose like Minecraft, so AlphaStar is more appropriate

Did anyone save a copy of the Nature paper? It's no longer available at https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind ... ing-go.pdf