The gap between the bottom professionals and the top ones is very wide. Cho Chi Kun (born in 1956) became one of Kitani's pupils in
1962 when he moved to Japan. He reached professional 1 dan in 1968 and 9 dan in 1981. He won his first title in 1976, The Oza,
but he didn't start to take the big titles until 1980 (Meijin), 1981 (Honinbo) and 1983 (Kisei).

So it took him 6 years to get from strong amateur to pro 1 dan (1962 to 1968) and about 12 more years to start winning the big titles
(1968 to 1980). AlphaGo has done the "easy" bit - getting to a low ranked professional, the hard work is getting from there to where
Lee Sedol is - winning the big tournaments. It took Cho twice as long to do that as it took him to reach 1 dan pro.

When I was in Japan in 1970 I went on the Nihon Kiin staff outing to Expo 70 in Osaka, on the coach I sat next to Murakami Bunsho. He
had already been Amateur Honinbo and had beaten several professionals at both two stones and in even games. He had beaten Sakata in
an even game in 1969. He said that he would need two stones to be confident of beating Sakata, when he played him he was aware of how big
the gap was between him and the top professionals. I would estimate Murakami's playing strength as that of a low ranked pro, similar
to Fan Hui, probably stronger. <There are some 82 of his games on GoGod>

So fwiw I think the gap from Fan Hui and AlphaGo to Lee Sedol is really big. I think AlphaGo might win one game, no stress, no fatigue and
the ability to read out the really difficult fights. Lee Sedol will win the other four games - he can push the game into a really difficult
ko fights and he has the experience of the big occasions.

So 4-1 to Lee Sedol. I decided to join Life in 19x19 today - so this is my first post!

John

I really hope AlphaGo plays its first move on Tengen. Bonus points for following up with opposing 4-4 and 3-3, but that is really too much to hope for.

_________________
- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Couldn't you have said the same about Kasparov and ordinary GM's back in the day of Deep Blue?

Interesting POV, but IMO maybe a bit too human-centric? You can't compare the learning curve between humans and machines - humans slow down drastically once they reach around 7d because that is near the limit of their brain capacity, but machine capacity limits are very different. It's like comparing the graphs of f(x)=X^0.5 and f(x)=100X^0.5.

OTOH, though, one thing that might make your argument valid is the fact that AlphaGo is learning through human-produced games. So the ceiling will be set similar to that of humans, at least learning material-wise. But imitating human-produced games is not the only method it uses for study, in fact the very reason AlphaGo is so strong is because it applies many different learning networks(i.e. learning how to predict moves, learning how to evaluate position, learning how to pick the best move etc.) at the same time.

From what I understand AlphaGo's knowledge of pro games are mainly used for reading ahead(predicting moves) and selecting candidate moves. Since those two compose a bulk of one's playing skill, I think it's likely that AlphaGo's skill will be stuck at 'human level' for quite some time, until its experience piles up enough to see the flaws in those man-made textbooks. So maybe your guess will be right after all, at least for a while.



Nice to see a fellow newcomer who was brought in by AlphaGo. It sure generates interest, doesn't it?

Don't you think that this effect ("seeing" some flaws) might have happened once already, with the textbooks written by strong amateur players (KGS 6d - 9d) ?

_________________
The really most difficult Go problem ever: https://igohatsuyoron120.de/index.htm
Igo Hatsuyōron #120 (really solved by KataGo)

Yeah, I heard the process was under the way (i.e. discarding games it now considered 'weak' - like the 6~7d games), but not completed (i.e. wasn't able to discard 9d level games yet) by the time of the Fan Hui matches.

Anyway, what happened with those 'KGS textbooks' seems largely irrelevent since I heard they are now mostly feeding the program 'professional made textbooks' to prepare for the Lee Sedol matches. And in this case I think the 'surpassing textbook' stage will start a lot later than with the KGS games, because the quality of the games are not only higher but much less diverse. In the case with KGS games there was a large difference in strength so the program was able to sort out the weaker ones with the hints it gained from the stronger ones. With professional games that won't happen very much; it'll have to wait until it polishes it's skills internally and that will take a lot more time. Which is why I don't think it will happen until the 'Big Game' starts.

Hi John, long time no see!

Myungwan Kim criticized alphago for following bad joseki. I wonder if Lee Sedol could prepare some hamate taking advantage of this. If you know the bot is going to play the "correct" move maybe you can take it off-book and confuse it early.

There was an interesting article posted earlier today, where Lee Sedol was interviewed after returning from the Nongshim Cup ([1]).

During dinner, after returning from Shanghai, he drank for a bit for the first time in a little while (apparently, it was Kaoliang). He'd been drinking, so maybe he was drunk during the interview (that's my own speculation), but was quoted as saying:



Rather, he said that though Ke Jie made some fatal mistakes, he (Lee Sedol) made more fatal mistakes. And if he (Lee Sedol) dwelt on that fact, he was really angry at himself.



Lee Sedol always says, and it means that the various mistakes that he made during the game against Ke Jie were extremely painful.

When asked whether these same kind of mistakes would happen in his upcoming match against AlphaGo, Lee Sedol replied that he'd make similar mistakes. But, he declared:



In a recent public interview about AlphaGo, it was brought up that AlphaGo had gotten to a fairly strong level, and they asked if AlphaGo could play evenly with Lee Sedol. To that he replied:



He later said:




Later, near the end of the article, Lee Sedol acknowledged that it'd actually be scary to play AlphaGo in maybe 2 years from now. So 2 years down the road, if he were given the challenge to play AlphaGo, he wouldn't do it for $1 million dollars - they'd have to pay him $3 million to play in that case




[1] http://sports.media.daum.net/sports/gen ... _SPORTS=R6

_________________
be immersed

Too bad Lee Sedol does not explain what he means here. (Instead he already hides it while saying it: "unquantifiable".)

Yeah, I dunno. Either he really can't quantify it, or he just can't quantify it while drinking Kaoliang

Also, on a related note, there's another (IMO less interesting) article [1], where Park Junghwan 9d (ranked #1 in Korea), Ke Jie 9d, and Iyama Yuta 9d all basically say that they think Lee Sedol will win 5-0 against AlphaGo this time. Though, some argue that $1 million dollars isn't enough for this match, given the significance that it would represent if Lee Sedol 9d were to somehow lose. I guess that's why Lee said he'd increase the price if the match were held in a couple of years - he and other top pros are extremely confident that the computer has no chance.

We'll find out if their confidence is founded next week

[1] http://sports.media.daum.net/sports/gen ... _SPORTS=R1

_________________
be immersed

Thanks for the nice translation! But I think I'll have to make a small correction to this part:



I don't think a pro will ever openly thrash his fellow pro's strength like that, even for someone as fiery as Lee.

I wouldn't be so surprised if DeepMind say they're already expecting those words from Lee Sedol.

Thank you. Looking at it now, you are correct (판후이 2단과 둔 기보) - I totally agree.

I read this part too quickly.

I am doing these translations partially for my own study, so if you find any other mistakes, feel free to let me know.

_________________
be immersed

I think DeepMind is confident from their side, too - to be sure.

I lost a little bit of respect for them, though, when I saw the nature video clip where one of the lead programmers on the team mentioned their upcoming challenge against "Lee See-dol".

It's a small mistake, and has nothing to do with the development of their AI - but at least it gives me the idea that he might not understand the magnitude of difference between a pro and top pro if he doesn't even know how to pronounce the name of the person they are challenging.

That being said, a lot of pros don't understand deep learning that well, either, so anything could happen next week, in my opinion

_________________
be immersed

He means tipping the game off balance and making it complicated and chaotic when things don't go one's way.


Although I personally think the pros are being a little bit overconfident, I somewhat agree to Lee's argument here that humans have the upper hand in their "twisting and shaking". Because although at first glance machines might seem to be stronger in complicated fights due to their precise reading ability, in reality this may not be true for the following reasons:

1. At pro level, fights are usually not just about linear reading but making many strategic choices (i.e. selecting the best variation that serves the bigger strategy) along the way, thus involving a lot of evaluation. Even though AlphaGo employs a specialized network dedicated to this part, I imagine evaluation is still not its forte (yet). OTOH, since AlphaGo's evaluation skills is not based on imitating humans, I think this is the area where it most likely can surpass the pros. Whether it can do it this time, we'll soon find out.

2. The bigger problem in complicated fights I think is not evaluation, but selecting candidate moves to read ahead. In order to narrow the near infinite number of searching-trees, AlphaGo picks candidate moves to read based on 'intuition'. This 'intuition' is basically imitating human moves and using standardized data collected from playing itself. The problem is, because of this 'standardized' selecting process, it can become weak at thinking outside the box and might be prone to missing unusual but brilliant moves (an area which Lee particularly excels.).

Just my 2 cents.

We all know that the big scientific question is whether they're going to make Hikaru no Go 4 for after this, obviously.

_________________
On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

It's an embarrassing and unprofessional mistake, but it may also be a product of reading more about a subject than you talk about it. I don't know how to pronounce Lee's name either. I wouldn't pronounce it 'See-dol', but I don't know how 'dol' is supposed to sound.

Related: in graduate school, I was good friends with a Serbian grad student. After knowing him for a year, he and his girlfriend got married, and she joined him in the States. I constantly mispronounced her name ('Yelen-a' instead of 'Ye-lena'). I could hear the difference, I could say it right when being careful, but in conversation, it came out wrong. I finally had to stop myself, and apologize for getting it wrong so much.

tl;dr: mouth-words are hard.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Communication is fraught with peril.

Did he yell, "I love you, man!" halfway through the interview? That would be a tell.