wineandgolover wrote:Has anybody found a place where we can bet real dollars, pounds, or euros on the outcome? I have as much interest in Bitcoin as I do Facebook, that is to say, none.
But if somebody wanted to bet even money, I'd bet a bit on Lee Sedol to win. And if somebody wanted to give me good odds, I'd bet a lot on him winning 5-0.
My gut feeling is that probability wise, the highest chance is Lee winning by 4-1 followed closely by AlphaGo winning 5-0. If I were to bet money, I'd actually bet on AlphaGo winning 5-0 because it's the "vastly underrated choice with a pretty good chance" (and I'm saying this as a long time fan of Lee.).
I think a close-contested match will be unlikely, since 1. AlphaGo seems to improve pretty quickly (compared to humans) so the chances that its current level is very close to Lee is relatively low (even if you take into account diminishing returns), and 2. in Go, the stronger player's chance to win is a lot bigger than e.g. chess. The main reason many top pros are similar in strength is the same as why the world's best sprinters are similar in speed - top humans tend to cluster around the biological limit set by nature. Since machines are not bound to this biological limit, the chances that the machine's strength and the human's strength is similar becomes lower (I've discussed this matter in post #44) - and just a minor difference in strength (i.e. something a bit bigger than the difference between top pros) will be enough to produce a lopsided result. So if Alphago wins, it'll probably be 5-0;, if Lee wins, 4-1 since humans are prone to mistakes.
There are 3 reasons I think the pros are underestimating AlphaGo. First, from what I've seen, their speculations are mostly based on what they've seen from the Fan Hui games and their past knowledge of Go programs and don't show a lot of understanding of how AlphaGo works. Second, the Deepmind team, who appears to be go players themselves and also have the best knowledge of AlphaGo's status, sounds pretty confident in their interviews (OC though, what else can they do?
). Third, and the biggest reason, is that AlphaGo playing Lee is likely to be quite stronger than the tygem "deepmind" account - because of better hardware and bluffing (Deepmind team seems well aware that this account is known in Korea, so they've probably tried to hide its full strength).That said, I do think AlphaGo's improvement speed would have slowed down, so I'll go with the majority with Lee winning this time. However as I said in the beginning, If I were to bet money, I'll bet on the A.I. winning by a landslide.
