What is your take on defeat of Go World Champion by Alpha Go System designed by google?

One day we will be able to threaten an ATM and get money.

Matt and I watched all the games with great interest, since we’re both in the field of computer science, and Matt is also a Go enthusiast.

Go is a fascinating game to see an AI do so successfully because the way that humans play Go is not very systematic. Strategies to win are unintuitive, and the consequences of any given move are not immediately obvious. Expert human Go players become good by playing lots of matches and learning to recognize various situations that arise. Through familiarity with different board configurations they learn what is best to do in each situation. They learn to develop a “feeling” for the board. This is not really the kind of thinking that computers are typically good at.

Also, unlike many games that AIs play, it cannot be solved via “brute force” – that is, by calculating every possible move it could make, and every possible response its opponent might make, etc. because the “problem space” is very large, meaning that there are too many possibilities for the AI to consider in a timely manner. This is a limitation of our current hardware. Quantum computing might change this.

The AI was trained the way an expert is trained – by playing lots and lots of games. An AI can play a huge number of games much faster than a human can, which is where computing power became an advantage here. It also doesn’t get tired and make mistakes after hours of concentration like a human does.

As for the AI uprising, I’m not worried.

Meh. In chess, computers, even off-the-shelf models with inexpensive software (such as Fritz or even the free to use Stockfish), have been capable of beating even Grandmaster level players on a pretty much consistent basis for years. This was long considered to be one of the hypothetical benchmarks for intelligence in computers, yet two decades after Kasparov vs Deep Blue we still don’t have truly intelligent machines, no matter how convincingly they may mimic intelligence.

The Go wins are a lot more exciting than the chess wins. The problem space in chess is sufficiently small that brute force (in combination with some intelligent heuristics) can be applied.

It is hugely significant as it shows that there are no limits on machine intelligence and that complex tasks such as diagnosing illness are or will be soon better done by machines. Machines will soon be designing other machines so we can no longer even be sure how they work or what they do. However as long as we can unplug them from the mains they are at our mercy.

The threat is not yet becoming a reality, but I think there is a great danger in the next 100 years or so. In the near term, there are a lot of jobs that are being projected to be taken over by computers.

@Mariah

Comparing chess with Go wasn’t really my point though.

@RedDeerGuy1 For the fees the ATMs charge nowadays to get your own money back, it is the ATMs that should be wearing the ski masks.

@Espiritus_Corvus

Eh, whenever I need cash I just go into the store, purchase something small (a soda or whatnot) and get cashback. Cheaper than ATM fees and at least I get a little something for the exchange.