[HN Gopher] 8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on ...
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       8 years later: A world Go champion's reflections on AlphaGo
        
       Author : rayshan
       Score  : 70 points
       Date   : 2024-03-19 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.google)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
        
       | dumpsterlid wrote:
       | Google please spend your money and time actually improving your
       | absurdly dysfunctional products instead of wasting your time on
       | thinly veiled AI hype advertising that everyone can immediately
       | identify as smarmy.
       | 
       | Sincerely,
       | 
       | Literally Everybody Not In The Bubble Of Working At Google
        
         | huytersd wrote:
         | What dysfunctional products. I use atleast 7 Google products
         | during my day and they all work really well and for _free_.
        
           | imiric wrote:
           | > for _free_
           | 
           | Strange to see this popular misconception on HN.
           | 
           | Adtech products are certainly not free/gratis. You're paying
           | with your data, usage and attention. They're extracting far
           | more value out of you than you do from their products.
        
             | sfn42 wrote:
             | Extracting makes it sound like they're taking something
             | from me. From my perspective they're not. If they can make
             | value from shit I do that's great, at least someone's
             | getting something out of my procrastination.
             | 
             | And I get to use neat stuff like youtube, Google Docs etc
             | without paying any money. Sounds like a win win to me.
        
         | brainwad wrote:
         | > Literally Everybody Not In The Bubble Of Working At Google
         | 
         | Trust me, Googlers would like our products to not suck, too.
        
       | ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
       | I thought it would be an easy victory              I ... ended up
       | only winning one out of our five games
       | 
       | It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of how
       | AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can compete
       | anymore.
       | 
       | I think we are in a similar situation in multiple professions
       | today. For example with self-driving.
       | 
       | Musk recently said, that other car manufacturers are not much
       | interested in talks about licensing FSD because they don't think
       | it can work.
       | 
       | In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers
       | anymore.
        
         | svachalek wrote:
         | > In ten years, probably no human can compete with AI drivers
         | anymore.
         | 
         | That's what they said 10 years ago. Sooner or later people will
         | say it and be right, but the last few percent of any problem is
         | a lot harder than people give it credit for. It may not be that
         | hard to stay in a lane or write a little code, and that may
         | look like it's doing most of the job, but those common tasks
         | are just the easy part.
        
           | ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
           | 10 years ago, a lot of FSD was still manually written code.
           | Manually written code gets harder and harder to improve, the
           | larger the codebase.
           | 
           | Now it is all NNs and therefore will scale with more data and
           | more compute. Which is increasing exponentially. So far it
           | seems like they are not hitting diminishing returns.
        
             | Buttons840 wrote:
             | Yeah, and plain Q learning is able to iteratively improve a
             | policy in any environment. Every single loop leading to
             | improvement, and yet it hasn't really solved much of
             | anything since the 60s (just some toy problems).
             | 
             | My point being, we don't know where the asymptote lies.
             | Computers have had self improving algorithms since the 60s,
             | and people have been making the same bold claims, like you,
             | that because an iterative process for improvement has been
             | discovered, we're close to super human AI since the 60s
             | too.
        
           | huytersd wrote:
           | I think Waymo does better than a vast percentage of human
           | drivers. It's here already.
        
             | cjbgkagh wrote:
             | But the average hour is not driven by the average driver,
             | better drivers drive more hours, so it has to be better
             | than the average driver in order to result in fewer
             | incidents.
        
               | huytersd wrote:
               | There's no reason better drivers drive more hours. You
               | can be a shit semi driver. That being said, it's an
               | irrelevant comment. If it's at average now this is the
               | worst it can get and it's already way above average.
        
               | cjbgkagh wrote:
               | I don't disagree that self driving is good and will
               | eventually get there. Just pointing out a flaw in your
               | reasoning.
               | 
               | Yes, such a person can exist, the hypothetical counter
               | example doesn't disprove the general statement. I think
               | it's safe to say that in general the more time someone
               | spends driving the better driver they are.
        
           | bevekspldnw wrote:
           | "Driving" is solved. Driving with humans on the road - doing
           | unpredictable human things - is far off still.
           | 
           | My guess is industrial and home robotics will solve a lot of
           | the "doing things around humans" problems in the next ten
           | years.
           | 
           | Why the hell people decided to automate giant death machines
           | before perfecting small things never made sense to me.
        
             | ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
             | Driving the giant death machines costs us billions of
             | manhours every day. Hundreds of billions of manhours per
             | year.
             | 
             | Which small thing puts a similar burden on mankind?
        
               | bevekspldnw wrote:
               | Phones.
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | > "Driving" is solved. Driving with humans on the road -
             | doing unpredictable human things - is far off still.
             | 
             | Plus there's serious questions about liability with self
             | driving cars which are still unresolved in most of the
             | world - if the goal is to have vehicles operate themselves
             | with no human supervision, who goes to jail when they kill
             | someone? Despite all of the progress that's been made with
             | AI it's mostly been in low-stakes problems where failure
             | isn't a big deal, so we don't have a consensus on what
             | we're supposed to do when a neural network negligently
             | obliterates a person because some logistics company wanted
             | to save a few bucks on driver salaries.
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | The answer almost certainly has to be the manufacturer.
               | I'm sure not responsible if my properly maintained and
               | used self-driving car kills someone. That said, it's a
               | novel area that doesn't have a clear analog to other
               | products today.
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | There's also the question of incident response, if a
               | human driver "malfunctions" you take them out of service
               | and the rest of the world keeps going, but if a self-
               | driving model malfunctions there are potentially millions
               | of vehicles running the same software ready to make
               | exactly the same mistake until the issue is isolated and
               | fixed. Should we ground the entire fleet of vehicles
               | running that software until the issue is resolved and
               | software re-certified, if the software is demonstrably
               | dangerous? How much would that cost?
        
             | pinkmuffinere wrote:
             | Fwiw, I work in home robotics, but have no experience in
             | self driving. My halfway-naive belief is that self-driving
             | is easier than getting useful home robots --in fact I feel
             | it's not even a close comparison. Some reasons:
             | 
             | - The home is a very unstructured environment, whereas
             | roads have at least _some structure_, and perhaps ~70% of
             | the most useful roads even have clear lane markings and
             | other signs.
             | 
             | - People already know that roads are dangerous, and there's
             | an expectation that babies won't suddenly crawl in front of
             | cars. This doesn't exist in the home
             | 
             | - People are more comfortable being recorded on roads and
             | highways than in their own homes, so you can get training
             | data more easily for self driving.
             | 
             | - to do something useful in the home, imo you need to solve
             | navigation _and_ complicated manipulation problems. For
             | self driving, you only need to solve the navigation
             | problem.
             | 
             | - (this is speculation on my part) Customers will happily
             | pay 10k-20k extra for a self-driving car, and there are
             | industries in which even more cost makes sense. Customers
             | are less likely to pay that for a robot that does your
             | chores
             | 
             | Would be very interested to hear the perspective of someone
             | that works on self-driving
        
               | reaperman wrote:
               | > Customers are less likely to pay that for a robot that
               | does your chores
               | 
               | They will if you can get them 2% financing like I can get
               | on a new Honda HR-V.
        
               | bevekspldnw wrote:
               | Yes this is my point - the home is a hard place to
               | operate in but less potential for lethal outcomes. If we
               | can solve home robotics I think cars would be easier.
               | 
               | Also, a robot that replaces a housekeeper would have a
               | huge market. I'd pay a handsome sum to have perfectly
               | cleaned kitchen and bathrooms every day when I wake up.
        
               | pinkmuffinere wrote:
               | For clarity, I'll call out the areas where I think we
               | disagree:
               | 
               | > "the home ... [has] less potential for lethal
               | outcomes."
               | 
               | I don't think this is true. Roads already have systems in
               | place to make them safer, and people are aware of the
               | dangers. This isn't the case at home, and useful home
               | robots certainly have the ability to cause serious
               | injuries/deaths
               | 
               | > "If we can solve home robotics I think cars would be
               | easier"
               | 
               | I also think cars are easier. However, I think this is
               | _why_ we've made more progress towards solving self
               | driving.
               | 
               | > "I'd pay a handsome sum to have perfectly cleaned
               | kitchen and bathrooms every day when I wake up."
               | 
               | When you say "perfectly cleaned rooms", I think "better
               | than you can get with a 90th percentile hired cleaner". I
               | suspect useful home robots might be 10 years out, but I'm
               | doubtful we'll get "perfectly cleaned rooms" from a
               | commercial home robot and using the above criteria within
               | even the next 50 years. Maybe controversial, but I think
               | AGI might be easier, lol
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | >Customers will happily pay 10k-20k extra for a self-
               | driving car, and there are industries in which even more
               | cost makes sense. Customers are less likely to pay that
               | for a robot that does your chores
               | 
               | It would be at least an upper middle class purchase at
               | that level but it depends how generally useful it was.
               | People pay thousands of dollars a year for a housekeeper
               | to come by.
        
             | samatman wrote:
             | I think your guess that home robotics will be solving
             | problems before self-driving cars git gud will be disproven
             | (industrial robotics have been delivering value for five
             | decades at least).
             | 
             | Home robotics has to solve two problems: the robot and
             | operating the robot ~perfectly. Self-driving cars already
             | have cars, which are waldos, if you squint. What sort of
             | sensors should be added is up for debate but the actuation
             | mechanism is a solved problem, and a very simple one, cars
             | have three linear inputs and two binary ones for the turn
             | signals. Technically a few more but none of them are any
             | less trivial.
             | 
             | There's less risk of a fatality when Rosie Robot knocks
             | over the vase you inherited from your grandmother, but
             | people are no more tolerant of that kind of failure in home
             | robots than they are in cars.
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | And cleaning a house isn't one task. It's a whole slew of
               | different tasks which, given some basic instructions, my
               | housekeeper can handle easily without supervision. And
               | there's quite a bit of common sense required.
        
             | Veserv wrote:
             | "Driving" is not solved unless you mean perfectly paved
             | streets in perfect weather on empty streets with no
             | pedestrians. A competent solution like Waymo can handle
             | significantly more complex cases at real world levels of
             | complexity, but it is still unclear how comprehensive and
             | robust that really is across the massive complexity of
             | reality even without other cars on the road. There is
             | simply not enough data, and no independent audits yet.
             | 
             | It is prudent to remain cautiously optimistic that the
             | evidence will bear out in time, but not assert unsupported
             | claims.
        
               | bevekspldnw wrote:
               | Precisely my point, I'm talking about the DARPA grand
               | challenge era of "look this car drives itself" being the
               | "solved" part. I'd you cleared all the roads and left
               | street signs and stoplights I'm sure most self-driving
               | cars would be fine.
               | 
               | People got way overconfident once the grand challenges
               | were accomplished.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | You do realize this was 8 years ago, and no Go engine came even
         | close to what Alpha Go was able to do right? Afaik, there
         | weren't even any competitive engines period. It basically came
         | out of nowhere.
        
           | ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
           | That's what I meant.
           | 
           | That's how it usually goes with technological progress.
           | 
           | In any field.
           | 
           | Progress is minimal for a few years and then suddenly jumps
           | up very suddenly.
           | 
           | So to predict what's coming, you can't just extrapolate the
           | progress of recent years. You have to account for it being
           | exponential with a very uneven distribution of sudden jumps.
        
             | pvg wrote:
             | _In any field._
             | 
             | That would be pretty strange. For a trivial counterexample,
             | you can look up the history of integrated circuits from
             | invention to today.
        
             | zehaeva wrote:
             | I'm not sure one can, from today that is, really understand
             | how huge of a leap was made by AI at this time.
             | 
             | Even going back to the closest analogue, chess, there were
             | good chess engines for a long time prior to Kasparov
             | loosing in 97 to deep blue. Even before Kasparov lost Chess
             | engines were pretty good, just look at the game in 96 when
             | Kasparov won. A grand master would still need to put some
             | thought into how he played.
             | 
             | In Go however even the best engines couldn't hold a candle
             | to a professional player, let alone someone who was the
             | equivalent of a chess grand master. Hell, even as a lowly
             | amateur player I was able to trounce some of the most
             | powerful AIs at the time. Looking at some of the Pro vs AI
             | games back in the early 2010s it's almost painful how bad
             | they were.
             | 
             | It's hard to communicate just how huge of a leap this was,
             | and just how shocking to the whole Go community. It would
             | be like a child one day being unable to speak and the
             | literal next day reciting Shakespeare.
        
             | xcv123 wrote:
             | AlphaGo took many AI researchers by surprise. An even
             | bigger surprise came next year, with AlphaZero:
             | 
             | "AlphaZero was a reinforcement learning system that was
             | able to master three different perfect information games -
             | chess, shogi (Japanese chess), and Go - at superhuman
             | levels by just learning from self-play, without using any
             | human expert games or domain knowledge crafted by
             | programmers.
             | 
             | Its predecessor AlphaGo, which defeated the world champion
             | Go player in 2016, was revolutionary but relied on human
             | expert games and domain-specific rules coded by the
             | DeepMind researchers.
             | 
             | AlphaZero started from random play and used a general-
             | purpose reinforcement learning algorithm to iteratively
             | improve its gameplay through self-play, ending up with
             | superior performance compared to the best human players and
             | previous game-specific AI systems.
             | 
             | Many experts were stunned that a general algorithm could
             | rediscover from scratch the millennia-old principles and
             | strategies for these highly complex games, often
             | discovering novel and counterintuitive moves along the
             | way."
        
           | vintermann wrote:
           | Not entirely right. Remi Coulom's Monte Carlo Tree Search, in
           | 2006, was the first really big discovery. It didn't make
           | engines good enough to beat the best humans, but it steadily
           | made them good enough to beat 99% of go playing humans,
           | playing at up to 6 - 7 dan level. It was still part of
           | AlphaGo, too (though as I recall AlphaGo Zero did away with
           | it).
        
             | radarsat1 wrote:
             | I think AlphaZero does use MCTS?
        
               | FooBarBizBazz wrote:
               | The thing AlphaZero did away with, AFAIK, is supervision
               | with expert games. Instead it just knows the rules and
               | tries to win.
        
         | lawn wrote:
         | > It's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware of
         | how AI is taking over.
         | 
         | I think the interesting thing is how an expert in a field is
         | wholly unprepared for predicting how the future will develop.
         | 
         | You mention what Musk has said about FSD and how it will
         | completely take over in just ten years, but I feel compelled to
         | point out that Musk has said that it's just right around the
         | corner with only small challenges left, for many years.
         | 
         | I wouldn't place any faith in anything Musk says.
        
           | nemothekid wrote:
           | Musk wasn't wrong - he just wasn't the person to deliver it.
           | Waymo, AFAICT works astonishingly in San Francisco. I think
           | you can argue that it might not work in the snow, but that's
           | pretty much it
        
             | Veserv wrote:
             | Musk was wrong. He said specifically and unequivocally that
             | Tesla would be delivering fully autonomous vehicles to
             | customers within a year, every year for the last 8 years.
             | 
             | Just to get ahead of anybody claiming it was not a firm
             | promise, in 2019: " I think we will be feature-complete
             | full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able
             | to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the
             | way to your destination without an intervention -- this
             | year. I would say that I am certain of that. That is not a
             | question mark." [1]
             | 
             | See that part where he says: "I would say that I am certain
             | of that. That is not a question mark." That is called a
             | firm promise.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-doubles-down-
             | on-cl...
        
             | lawn wrote:
             | If Musk was right we would've been there almost a decade
             | ago.
             | 
             | And we're still not really there yet. They work great
             | during some conditions and in certain areas, but they're
             | still nowhere close to making human drivers obsolete.
        
         | jfengel wrote:
         | At the time, I think _everybody_ was unaware of this. Everybody
         | followed the development of machine chess, but it was widely
         | assumed that machine go was an entirely different category of
         | difficulty. Chess engines gradually encroached on the very top
         | grandmasters. AlphaGo came out of nowhere.
        
         | hyperpape wrote:
         | At the time, the only public results were demonstration games
         | against a much weaker professional. The actual strength of the
         | machine was only known privately within DeepMind.
        
         | SkyMarshal wrote:
         | _> It 's interesting, how an expert in a field can be unaware
         | of how AI is taking over. And a few years later, no human can
         | compete anymore._
         | 
         | Easy to see that in hindsight, but when the game was actually
         | played it was earlier in the development of AI and less
         | apparent how good it had become.
        
         | dvh wrote:
         | FSD will never work because it concentrates defendants into
         | single juicy target.
         | 
         | When your neighbor Bob (who is still paying mortgage and his
         | wife is battling cancer and who occasionally babysit your kids)
         | ran over your cat, you don't sue him. But you would sue Tesla.
         | 
         | Mark my words, in 10 years ex-programmers will be throwing
         | shelter cats under FSD cars just to earn a living.
        
       | tromp wrote:
       | > Go is a deeply complex strategic game -- famously far more
       | complicated than chess, with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00
       | 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
       | ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
       | 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
       | possible board configurations.
       | 
       | The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much,
       | or to be exact [1]:
       | 
       | 20816819938197998469947863334486277028652245388453054842563945682
       | 09274196127380153785256484516985196439072599160156281285460898883
       | 14427129715319317557736620397247064840935
       | 
       | Indeed far larger than the ~ 4.8 x 10^44 legal chess positions
       | [2], that is in between the number of legal 9x9 and 10x10 Go
       | positions.
       | 
       | [1] https://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html
       | 
       | [2] https://tromp.github.io/chess/chess.htm
        
         | HackerThemAll wrote:
         | All these digits are only making it more obfuscated. Using the
         | order of magnitude it's 10^44 for chess versus 10^170 for Go.
         | Thus, Go is 10^126 times more complex than chess.
         | 
         | For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the
         | universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.
        
           | tromp wrote:
           | Or one could say that Go is about as complex as 4
           | simultaneous games of go, with the number of positions being
           | about the 4th power.
        
           | kibwen wrote:
           | _> All these digits are only making it more obfuscated._
           | 
           | I think that using these numbers as as stand-ins for
           | difficulty is itself a form of obfuscation.
           | 
           | The truth is that, despite the massive number of potential
           | board states, Chess and Go are some of the easier games to
           | solve, thanks to their nature (perfect information, zero
           | randomness, alternating turns where each player plays exactly
           | one move). And trying to use board states as a proxy for
           | complexity and complexity as a proxy for difficulty doesn't
           | generalize to other categories of games. Compared to Go,
           | what's the complexity of Sid Meier's Civilization? If I
           | devise a game of Candyland with 10^180 squares, is that
           | harder to devise an optimal strategy for than Go just because
           | it has more board states?
           | 
           | The reason that we're still using board states as a proxy for
           | difficulty is because historically our metric of "this is
           | difficult for a computer to play" was based on the size of
           | the decision tree and thus the feasibility of locally
           | searching it up to a given depth. In the age of machine
           | learning, surely we can come up with a more interesting
           | metric?
        
             | btilly wrote:
             | We have more theory for deterministic games. That doesn't
             | mean that it is harder to solve them to a human level.
             | 
             | Computers got to being better than humans in both Go and
             | poker in 2016. The difference is that
             | https://www.deepstack.ai/ was solvable by academics with
             | normal research grants. The training for the final version
             | of AlphaGo is estimated at about $35 million. And who knows
             | how many other versions were created?
             | 
             | Yes, actually solving Go and Civilization are both
             | impossible. But I would be shocked if playing Civilization
             | at a human level was too hard for us to solve with current
             | machine learning techniques.
        
           | banannaise wrote:
           | Number of possible game states is a poor measure of
           | complexity. How many game states does soccer or basketball
           | have, when you consider flight of ball and movement of
           | players? Does that tell us anything about whether basketball
           | is more complex than Go?
        
             | btilly wrote:
             | Every measure of complexity is limited in some way. So they
             | are all poor in various ways. That doesn't make them not
             | worthwhile.
             | 
             | Total game states is one measure. What does it take to
             | solve the game?
             | 
             | You can also look at the branching factor, how many moves
             | are there to make on average. For chess, it's 20. For go,
             | it's something like 300.
             | 
             | You can also look at how long it takes from a move to
             | seeing its negative consequences. A bad move in chess is
             | frequently visible in very few moves. You lose a piece. You
             | lose an exchange. Often these sequences are virtually
             | forced. By contrast, the consequences of a bad move in Go
             | are usually not visible for 50 moves or more. And there is
             | nothing forced about the sequence that gets there.
             | 
             | You can also look at how likely good players are to play
             | similar games. Many chess games have been played over and
             | over again. People sometimes play half the game out of a
             | memorized opening sequence. By contrast, it is plausible
             | that no Go game has ever been played twice on a 9x9 board.
             | It is very unlikely that any Go gamme has been played twice
             | on a 13x13 or 21x21 board.
             | 
             | You can also look at how big the skill gaps between humans
             | get. In my experience, a 1 stone difference in Go is
             | roughly a similar skill gap to 200 points of Elo in chess.
             | A rank beginner who barely moves the pieces may have a 400
             | rating. No human has ever reached a 2900 rating. That's
             | 12.5 levels. By contrast Go has 30 levels of amateur (kyo),
             | another 9 for serious players (dan), and then the skill
             | range among professionals is about another 3. That's 42
             | levels of fairly recognizable skill differences between
             | humans. Which speaks to how much more there is to learn
             | about Go than chess. (Even more so when you realize how
             | much of advancing in chess is a matter of making fewer
             | mistakes. By contrast advancing in Go is much more about
             | integrating better principles.)
             | 
             | No matter how you look at it, Go is much more complex than
             | chess.
        
               | bluecalm wrote:
               | One good measure is how much resources a computer program
               | needs to have to play optimally. This is hard to measure
               | as we don't have optimal programs but maybe "how much
               | resources is needed to play better than the best human"
               | is a sensible measure as well. Go wins on this one but
               | only marginally.
        
           | frutiger wrote:
           | > For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in
           | the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.
           | 
           | Yes, but what are the estimated number of states of all these
           | atoms?
        
         | lp4vn wrote:
         | Go is played in a a bigger board though and has this kind of
         | recursive nature where a subset of a go game is also a go game
         | while chess is more ad-hoc.
        
         | bluecalm wrote:
         | Complexity of the game has nothing to do with the number of
         | legal positions. It's very easy to design a game with arbitrary
         | number of positions which is very simple. While go might be
         | more complex than chess using a more reasonable measure this
         | argument was used to for arguing nonsense in scientific papers
         | in the past (that some poker games are more complicated than
         | chess because they have more possible states).
        
           | falserum wrote:
           | I have a further nitpick regarding terminology.
           | 
           | Wording like "game is more complex" overal seems incorrect.
           | Game is not complex by itself (for example go rules are
           | _extreemly_ simple), all the difficulty and challenge depends
           | on the skill of your oponent. Game only allows the opponent
           | to demonstrate the skill.
        
             | tromp wrote:
             | Beyond rule complexity, there are at least 5 measures of
             | game complexity in Combinatorial game theory [1]:
             | State-space complexity         Game tree size
             | Decision complexity         Game-tree complexity
             | Computational complexity
             | 
             | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_complexity
        
               | Kranar wrote:
               | Those are all meaningful measures of complexity, but it's
               | worth noting that all of them are a function of the
               | number of legal positions (among other things as well).
        
               | tromp wrote:
               | That would be quite a strange function. For example, Tic-
               | Tac-Toe has 26830 possible games on 5478 possible
               | positions, while 2x2 Go has 386356909593 possible games
               | on only 57 possible positions.
               | 
               | The major difference of course being that Go allows
               | stones to be captured.
        
           | Kranar wrote:
           | Are you sure that the complexity of a game has absolutely
           | nothing to do with the number of legal positions?
           | 
           | I mean I am open to hear the justification for this, but I
           | was fairly certain that all measures of game complexity are a
           | function of the number of legal positions. Now certainly
           | there are other factors, namely the cost of computing the
           | transition from one legal move to another legal move so a
           | simple game might have a very low cost transition function
           | while a complex game has a very complex transition function,
           | but I can't conceive of a game where the number of legal
           | positions bears no weight on the game's complexity.
        
             | jan_Inkepa wrote:
             | Take a game where you get to pick a single number between
             | one and a billion. If you pick 10 you win. This has a
             | billion states, but it's trivial. I can increase the bound
             | above a billion, it doesn't matter.
             | 
             | State count gives an upper bound, though, to how complex a
             | game can be, for sure.
        
       | Pet_Ant wrote:
       | I know there are Go channels in Korea for watching professional
       | matches... are there any for watching AIs face off against each
       | other?
        
         | apetresc wrote:
         | Virtually every public Go server at the moment, unfortunately.
        
         | mNovak wrote:
         | Michael Redmond, to my knowledge the highest ranked English-
         | speaking Go player, does youtube analyses of Go matches,
         | including Pro vs AI games, which are very insightful.
        
       | rhaps0dy wrote:
       | Great PR for Google from Lee! It totally isn't mostly for
       | advancing Google's commercial interests, the bottom line being:
       | 
       | "I believe that humans can partner with AI and make great
       | progress. As long as we can set clear principles and standards
       | for it, I am quite optimistic about the future of AI technology
       | in our daily lives."
       | 
       | I hope he got paid well.
        
       | bnprks wrote:
       | To my knowledge AlphaGo models never became meaningfully
       | available to the public, but 8 years later the KataGo project has
       | open source, superhuman Go AI models freely available and under
       | ongoing development [1]. The open source projects that developed
       | in the wake of AlphaGo and AlphaZero are a huge success story in
       | my mind.
       | 
       | I haven't played Go in a while, but I'm kind of excited to try
       | going back to use the KataGo-based analysis/training tools that
       | exist now.
       | 
       | [1]: https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo
        
       | alas44 wrote:
       | Google's documentary on AlphaGo
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y
       | 
       | Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be
       | convinced)
        
       | efrank3 wrote:
       | I can't believe it's been 8 years.
        
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