Yeah, from one game would be hard, but if you could tell the bot who the opponent was and its known weaknesses or at least general level maybe. But look what I found wandering the internet:

A few comments from a low-dan Go and somewhat better chess playing friend:

Not really - they only played 20 moves.



Unless he's improved recently (and why would he even try?), he plays pros on 6 stones or more.

If you allow yourself to ponder on this, it just gets worse Kirby, I'm afraid. Huxley once said an intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex. One might be tempted now, therefore, to say "sod it" and go back to prioritising sex. But David Levy, one of the big names in computer chess, recently did a late-in-life PhD at the Sorbonne on computers and sex, and this is now in book form as "Love and Sex with Robots." He even goes so far as to say that continuing advances in computers and robotics "will make legal marriages between Homo and Robo feasible by mid-century."

Best to take a detached Zen-like view, and recall that life, like go, is a game of co-existence.

Yeah, it seems I was wrong that people aren't looking at the metagame: more information here. It's difficult to implement in the current environment, though, because the standard interface for talking to a chess engine (UCI) doesn't tell it who it's playing. So any between-game hyperparameter tuning has to be done manually by an operator.

(Of course this sort of opponent modeling is totally essential for exploitative play in poker, say.)

Perhaps in the future there will be computer matches in an environment where the engines have the ability to modify themselves between games. That could be pretty cool.

He's likely the best human candidate against AlphaZero, strongest Shogi professional ever, International Chess Master, Amateur dan Go player.

One thing in modern chess engines is that, to know who is better at the current position, you need to look at the estimate that shows how many pawns you are ahead. It's not percentages like in go.

For example: in all of these games Stockfish at one point thought it is 1.10 ahead, but in reality, Alpha Zero may have thought it is winning by 75% which is much more convenient. Isn't it? Maybe chess players were thinking in the wrong direction. People are saying that Alpha Zero is making a lot of long-term sacrifices.

The chess part seems very interesting. Silver himself quoted chess and checkers as examples where search is absolutely essential (because of the tactical nature), and knowledge-based approaches are not appropriate. This is still about search of course, but I would have bet blindly that NNs are not a good deal here for their gain / slowdown ratio (I assumed 100 times, but the paper says 1000 times - and I thought the handcrafted evaluation are already reasonably good).

But in retrospect, there is some logic in this. The other day I peeked at the Houdini-Komodo match, and it seemed the current state of art is roughly 50M pos/s, for about 5G per move selection, with a typical depth or PV length of 30 plies. This would mean a searched branch factor of 2 with full minimax, so on average maybe 4 or more with perfect alphabeta (even more actually, because of selective depth). In any case, the 1000 times slowdown would be regained at a successful branch factor reduction of about 1.25 times, which is not unrealistic.

That is still in the future. IMO intelligence means ability to solve previously unseen tasks, so I'm not sure if these examples qualify, even as early birds. Unless matchboxes are intelligent .

In traditional go evaluation, if you are ahead on points and have the move, you will win with correct play, unless there is a ko that enables your opponent to win. Otherwise, even knowing the exact point value of the position is not enough to say whether you are winning or not. That is one reason that the win rate of quasi-random rollouts was more effective for MCTS bots than the average winning point margin. In go, if you know not only the point value of the position but also the temperature, then you can make a pretty good estimate of who is ahead. For instance, if your opponent is 1½ pts. ahead, you have the move, and the temperature is 3, the game is very close; if the temperature is 1, you are a goner without a ko or the opponent's error; if the temperature is 5, you are the favorite. These temperatures might translate to an estimated win rate of less than 5% for temperature 1, 50% for temperature 3, and 66% for temperature 5. Note the non-linearity. These are my estimates of actual win rates, not win rates with quasi-random play. Monte Carlo win rates might be more like 30%, 50%, and 60%. Quien sabe?

Anyway, it may be that go playing programs that made use of estimates of both point value and temperature would perform better than programs that make use of ill defined "win rates". AFAIK, no strong program has utilized both estimates, so who knows? In any event, unlike win rates, point values and temperatures are well defined in go, even if they may be difficult to calculate in many positions.

In chess engines, point evaluations in terms of hundredths of a pawn have been very effective. OTOH, knowledge of temperature is quite crude. Is there any more accuracy than quiescent vs. non-quiescent? It is interesting that AlphaZero's use of "win rate" has proved more effective than the use of point evaluations by Stockfish. Chess seems to have no exact theory of temperature, so is pretty well stuck with point evaluations or, now, win rates, neither of which is well defined.

Edit: "Is there any more accuracy than quiescent vs. non-quiescent?" Well, yes. Checkmate and stalemate precisely as cool as you can get.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Yes, I regard intelligence as the ability to do something well that you have never done before.

Fairly obviously, I think that there are different kinds of intelligence.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Do you know where this definition comes from? I have used it since my childhood, I don't remember the origin but I doubt I came up with it myself. A few years ago I tried to look up the source but failed.

Most contemporary definitions seem to include things like lexical knowledge and it's application ability, so very different. And there is this one too: "intelligence is what intelligence tests measure".

How about intelligence is knowing there are better things to do than join Mensa

Well, it is not exactly a definition, but I came to it when I heard a real story about someone doing something well that they had not done before. What primed me to think that that was intelligence, I don't know.

OC, I had long doubted whether IQ tests test anything, factor analysis be damned.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

@moha: Nice video. That matchbox experiment is pretty cool.

@Bill: I'd say that I'm not really intelligent at anything, then. I rarely do something well the first time I try it. Only after practice can I get any sort of competency.




Good advice, John.



You bring up a good point, Monadology. I also find it problematic to equate moral status with particular intellectual capacities, even for unimpaired human beings. My perspective was more reflective in terms of finding self-worth, perhaps (e.g. what makes me valuable as a human being?). But maybe the implications are similar. If I try to equate my value as a human being, I suppose there is still the aspect of being a father to my children, and a husband to my wife. I'd say that I bring some value from that dimension, which can't currently be replaced by machines. Maybe that status could be replaced by another person, but I hope it won't be.

Maybe people are like go stones - no inherent value, but useful at the right place and the right time, under the right circumstances, working in coordination with the rest of the universe...

Or maybe I'm just pushing an analogy too far :-p

_________________
be immersed

Really? How about Go then?

See the 'Chinese coverage' part of Future of Go Summit article in Wikipedia

I thought that was more of the Chinese government not wanting to give free PR to a foreign tech company which doesn't play by their censorship rules than being upset about foreigners doing part of their culture better with computers. I presume the best Chinese chess players are Chinese though (and the bots too? how good are they?) so if you wanted another exhibition match that'd be in China and face the same PR problems.

Well, that's how to get to Carnegie Hall.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Me too; in my case, that's since 1971; but i don't think that during that time AI has advanced much compared to advances in computer hardware, despite the current hullabaloo. For sure, Alfie's impressive achievements are remarkable, but could it be that they tell us more about the nature of games like chess and Go than they do about the nature of intelligence?

To examine that question deeper than handwaving, we need to be aware that Alfie's method is basically a statistical number-crunching approach, which requires hardware able to read (probabilistically) all the way to the end of the game and back again gerzillions of times each time she has to make a move.

She can do this because although the game tree of Go is kind of big (sic), it's not that deep - at most 361. To be fair, her probabilistic navigator is sufficiently better than random to weed out enough nonsense that she can find moves good enough to beat people at the game they invented.

Alfie is as impressive at playing Go as a mobile phone is at recording and transmitting information - and considering the state of the telephony art 50 years ago, that's pretty impressive.

But is Alfie as smart as, say, an acacia tree that responds to overgrazing by releasing poison gas to ward off kudu?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-4w5xYLwiU
Or a Douglas Fir that nurtures its young?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrrSAc-vjG4

The robot football world cup maybe gives us a better idea about how smart today's machines are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2S9x0gUkpM

PS Needless to say, i think Swim is more intelligent than Alfie, but i suppose you could justifiably argue that i am a bit biased...

PPS Don't fret Kirby, your existence is not as meaningless as that of a Go stone, albeit no more meaningful than that of an acacia tree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq3B5prBsK0

_________________
i shrink, therefore i swarm

I think this is right. When I was in China a couple of months ago, talking to politicians, the people who run Chinese go and pros, AlphaGo was mentioned approvingly over and over again (and FineArt not once, I think). DeepMind got some mentions, But Google was never mentioned, except in a couple of conversations where I was reminded (by ordinary punters, not officials) about censorship. But actually it's similar in Japan, except that lack of mentions (though not total) of Google (but plenty of AlphaGo and DeepMind and Hassibis mentions) is due to self-censorship. Although there are far, far fewer people who talk about go in Britain, I'm certain it's close to that situation here, too (plus DeepMind is British, Google isn't). And throughout the world, although billions of people happily use Google/Amazon/Facebook etc, if you did a word association test for each company, I'm sure you'd get lots of words in the "evil" nexus.



I have tried to warn against treating AlphaGo as a cargo cult, so welcome this reminder from an AI professional. I'm also constantly reminded of something that Michael Redmond said: go is a very simple game. It may be hard for humans but change the tool and Redmond's proven right. Inserting a screw in a brick wall by hand is not just hard for humans, but impossible. Yet with the right tools it's a doddle. (And we don't get any Angst about that, do we?)