Open Letter to Google and Go Community about Doing the Right Thing
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We are at crossroads, at a moment in time where we face these moments of truths in the turning point of history in how companies like Google handle A.I. and the manner and ways in which they go about doing it will greatly influence, shape and affect the future events of the world. This is more than just about Go. And we need to ask Google and other innovators to take a much more transparent stand and a more open approach to all of this.
Deepmind pulled a false flag operation on the Go community with the Magic/Master ordeal, going against what it earlier had promised to play under AlphaBot whilst convinently maintaining plausible denialability had Master win rate not been respectable for the public bragging. Half the community here on reddit was fooled, some even saying there was zero chance Master was AlphaGo in disguise.
Had Google played fair from the getgo. Eventually A.I. would still have beat humans. But it would have done it in a manner that was fair and square. And had been an accurate truthful representation reflective of the real progress of A.I. at the time. Instead, Google artificially and intentionally, structured the so-called show-casing, of AlphaGo technologies in such an underhanded way using tactics to manipulate and deceive human perception into falsely and incorrectly believing that AlphaGo and Deepmind and Google tech was always better than humans at each and every level and stage of the A.I. advancement and development, and that such was always one step ahead of the curve ahead of the race, so to speak... But as we all know, this was not the case, far from it. And so the public deserved a transparent honest and trustworthy development of AI and not one in which shenanigans are pulled before our eyes for PR stunts and corporate imagery and such.
The recent mystery, mystique and confusion surrounding "master" has now been officially disclosed. This "name change" was most likely motivated by the element of plausible denial-ability. Because only when after Master succeeded in beat the top pros in a series of rapid online games did Google then and only then come clean and to claim the credit. Had the bot failed early on, very likely it would have been pulled, the disclosure and connection never officially made, and Google's AlphaGo still retaining its untarnished brand and records. The using of different names and different accounts goes directly against what Google had earlier promised in its earlier statements in which it had actually went out of its way to affirmatively declare on its own volition that in the future all AlphaGo games would be played under its real name of AlphaGo and AlphaBot. False flag operations (Master had a Korean flag) are usually the specialty reserved for intelligence agencies. So unless Google is taking a page from CIA/NSA, one should never have expected this level of trickery, and there is no justification or excuse.
There is a pattern of this sort of deception and illusion creating trickery going on at Deepmind and Google with respects to AlphaGo. Everything seems like very controlled release and kept too close to the chest, like this sort of artificial illusion of always being perfect and absolutely infallible at every step along the way. Akin to gaming human perception of reality. And not at all academically nor intellectually honest or transparent. For example, had the version of AlphaGo that defeated Fan Hui played Lee Sedol first and right off the bat, there would have been very little chance of AlphaGo securing any victories and very much more probably that Lee Sedol would have won all five games. Had the March 2016 version of AlphaGo played Ke Jie at the time instead of Lee Sedol it is again more likely that Ke Jie would have won many more games. Had AlphaGo and Lee Sedol immediately continued to play five more games after the first five, again it is likely that Lee Sedol would have obtained a higher win rate. Had AlphaGo actuallyed played Ke Jie last year, as previously agreed upon, there was a chance that Ke Jie could have won against it at the point in time. Same for Master. Had Master of right now played in six months or a year later's time any Chinese or Korean bot, Master would also have lost to it. In fact, the reason Google used the new name and kept the identity such a secret was because had Master totally failed to win in the test games, probably its true identity would never have been revealed to the real world.
However, the Google founders claim to be for openness and democracy and for leveling the playing field and not doing evil. If they had spent even a tiny fraction of the time and resources and effort to do whatever it could to in some way open source AlphaGo code (I had contacted Deepmind developers last year, they stated it was possible but would take some work) to be made available for free for the masses at large and not as much on this ridiculous string and incessant series of escalated PR Stunts then humanity itself would be far better off in both the short term and the long run.
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/Deepmind did a masterful mind manipulation for PR, in my opinion not the right thing to do. They purposefully structured the games to give the perception that AG was always infallable at each and every step of the way on the way up. Lee Sedol could have beat AG 13 and Ke Jie could have beat AG 19. Instead they used than Fan guy first. Sure, bots eventually would have been lightyears ahead of top pros, but Google didnt have to do magic tricks if they wanted to be honest and give true representation. And no matter how you slice it, since last March Google has been with AlphaGo the same level of intellectual misery as IBM had been with DeepBlue almost two decades back. But Deepmind cant stop bragging with Master this and Magic that it seems. And canceled Ke Jie twice once each year now, with some bs about China censoring Google when in fact Google in bed with NSA
I call on Google to do the right thing, to be more transparent where possible, and to in general be a better citizen of the world, more humble, not as proud, and no more of these sleight of hand trickery shenanigan. If Google would be willing to consider open sourcing whatever it could of AG to the community at large, this would be a solid first step in the right direction and on the right side of history.
And lastly, I hope Chinese FineArt steals AlphaGo thunder since Google seems to be intentionally dragging its feet, let the rug be pulled from underneath please lol
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UPDATES
Edit: We had so many naysayers on reddit saying that (wrongfully predicting) there was no way Master was AlphaGo etc..... Seems like Google intentionally fooled a most part of the Go community and should be utterly ashamed of its actions, in direct contradiction to what it earlier had affirmatively promised on its own volition that it would play under "AlphaGo" and "AlphaBot" and instead it did the "Master" bait and switch...
Previously AlphaGo representations openly denied that another bot was AG, this time around they "no comment"... and since it is so much stronger than anything else out there right now, even Ke Jie stated much stronger than AG back in March, it is a reasonable inference. The fact that right now Master played 50-0, nearly all the top players except for Lee Sodel, (why would he if he already got beat by AG) really lends credence to the theory that Master is Google related and does not bode well for the future of Go due to Google's underhanded tactics and shenanigans.
The name.... many folks thought they named AlphaGo because of Alphabet (Google's parent company, which is also Deepmind's parent company) but rather the truth was it was named "Alpha" in the sense of the Alpha Male... the male that dominates all other males. Now with the name of Master, this not only continues the bragging but also hints of racists (slavery) and brings the symbolic elitism onto another new level not so different from the Nazi Germany regime. (first it was Alpha male, now it is Master race connotations)
We now know for sure that Google is not in the spirit of sportsmanship and indeed with only these five games and nothing else (no source code, no open to play for a fee, etc) it is intellectual misery surpassing the level of what IBM did with DeepBlue when computers first beat Chess players 20 years ago. One would think we have progress into a more open fair society but guess not really.
Especially the name change. Master = AG, then the name change and the mysterious fashion of how this was conducted and etc was entirely unnecessary and unbecoming of a Google that used to vow to "do no evil". (especially since they promised if they ever do play online it will be under the name of AlphaGo, so this bait and switch would make it all double deceptive and hypocritical; at the very least Google is guilty of intentional misrepresentation but although in this case probably not a crime in US/EU/UK, but certainty goes a long way towards being unethical and of bad spirit, almost akin to playing with fake accounts, or having dup accounts)
IMHO We are not going to be running any version of AlphaGo on our desktop machines in the near future (five to ten years) even if magically our master the Google overlords were to somehow miraculously open source AlphaGo code tomorrow. (that is also never going to happen, but that is besides the point) Moore's law is dead. Also the problem with dennard scaling. Having more and more processor cores isn't going to help. AlphaGo's AI compute is ran on custom Google ASIC TensorFlow, not exactly general purpose CPU's made by Intel or AMD that we can buy from Amazon or get at Best Buy. And Nvidia CUDA is going no where fast. My guess is Master is three stones stronger than the AlphaGo in March 2016 that beat Lee Sedol, give or take a stone or two. Guess what? On a non-distributed system, meaning on a regular desktop versus Google's datacenter, there is zero change that Master can beat a top pro in a long game. And unless we move away from silicon (not going to happen in our lifetimes), unlike in Chess, there will never be the day that we can install an Go app on our smart phone and have it play better than the top Go players. Ke Jie doesn't have to worry finding a new career anytime soon.
And about the NDA comments If Google wanted to do a closed test and made the pro's sign NDA's there is no reason to have the games public at all. Google could have easily done it on their own closed servers if that was the goal, and the larger world would never have known about it unless a pro talked/leaked. And why TWO different fake accounts? (Magic and then Master). Note that at first the games were played under Magic, then when Google saw the win rate was what they had predicted and the outcome favorable they switched over to Master (full on cocky mode) and never went back to using Magic account again. If Google wanted a control account, then Magic should have played as many games as Master, this was far from the case. Reasonable inference could be drawn that Google wanted to test the waters with Magic, when all went well, they started the bragging with Master. Also, notice how although the AI only used 7 seconds per turn, it was also thinking on human time, and it never played any two games at once, meaning very likely they weren't playing this on commodity hardware, otherwise anyone could spin up dozen's of virtual machines on Amazon Web Services and call it a day. AlphaGo is not scaleable down to the single desktop level much less a smartphone and due to the limits of processor physics it never will be.
And last but not least, dangers of AI beyond Go, Elon Musk himself thought that AI could be more dangerous than nukes and that Google (Deepmind) was of most concern. Narrowed down to the scope of the Go community at large, both in the US at elsewhere in Korea, China, Japan, etc it is clear to see that Google is not doing this (AlphaGo) out of the kindness of its heart. All the Pro's are lapping it up and fighting like dogs over scraps of meat on the bones that Master Google throws their way. They can't see they are being used and thanking AlphaGo for it. Life imitates art no? I hope the irony wasn't lost on you. Google is merely using Go as a platform to advance their AI (NOT the other way around) and a marketing exposure gimmick, nothing more. AI is still in its nascent infancy, we as a humanity can't afford to screw this up and everything Google and Deepmind has shown through its actions causes concern for pause. They are not setting the best of examples for others to follow to say the very least.
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