[HN Gopher] Adversarial policies beat superhuman Go AIs (2023)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Adversarial policies beat superhuman Go AIs (2023)
        
       Author : amichail
       Score  : 299 points
       Date   : 2024-12-23 13:10 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | BryanLegend wrote:
       | It sometimes happens in the go world for complete amateurs to be
       | challenging to play against, because their moves are so
       | unpredictable and their shapes are so far away from being normal.
       | Wildly bizarre play sometimes works.
        
         | PartiallyTyped wrote:
         | Magnus (Carlsen, chess) does this often, he pushes people into
         | unknown territory that they are most certainly underprepared
         | for through new or obscure openings that complicate a position
         | very quickly. The game then turns tactical and they eventually
         | find themselves in a bad endgame, one against Magnus of all
         | people.
        
           | ozim wrote:
           | Just in case someone thinks Magnus comes up with those
           | openings on the spot.
           | 
           | No he has a team that uses computers to find out those plays
           | based on what other player played as all past matches are
           | available.
           | 
           | Source: I watched interview with a guy that was hired as a
           | computer scientist consulting gig by Magnus team.
           | 
           | It does not take away how good he is as I don't think many
           | people could learn to remember weird openings and win from
           | that against grand master level players anyway.
        
             | rybosworld wrote:
             | I remember reading that his memory is unrivaled - so this
             | also isn't a strategy the other top players could simply
             | copy.
             | 
             | In chess, there are basically three ways to evaluate moves
             | 
             | 1) pure calculation
             | 
             | 2) recognize the position (or a very similar one) from a
             | previous game, and remember what the best move was
             | 
             | 3) intuition - this one is harder to explain but, I think
             | of it like instinct/muscle memory
             | 
             | All the top players are good at all of these things. But
             | some are agreed upon as much better than others. Magnus is
             | widely agreed to have the best memory. The contender for
             | best calculator might be Fabiano.
             | 
             | In humans, all else being equal, memory seems to be
             | superior to calculation, because calculation takes time.
             | 
             | Chess engines seem to reverse this, with calculation being
             | better than memory, because memory is expensive.
        
               | zdragnar wrote:
               | This is the reason why I couldn't ever get into chess,
               | despite my dad and brother enjoying it. My intuition was
               | crap (having not developed it) and I lacked the ability
               | or desire to fully visualize multiple steps of the game.
               | 
               | All that remained was rote memorization, which makes for
               | a boring game indeed.
               | 
               | Despite all of that, I suspect chess will long outlive my
               | preferred entertainment of Unreal Tournament.
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | The magic of chess is in matchmaking.
               | 
               | I enjoy using nearly pure intuition when playing so I
               | just use that strategy and see the same ~50/50 win
               | percentage as most players because my ELO is based on how
               | I play past games and there's millions of online players
               | across a huge range of skill levels.
               | 
               | There's nothing wrong with staying at 1000 or even 300 if
               | that's what it takes to enjoy the game. It's only if you
               | want to beat specific people or raise your ELO that
               | forces you to try and optimize play.
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | I hate ladder systems. Winning is fun and losing is not.
               | Why would I purposely choose to play a game/system where
               | your win rate does not meaningfully improve as you skill
               | up?
               | 
               | That sounds frustrating and tedious. If I get better I
               | want to win more often.
        
               | linguistbreaker wrote:
               | But winning is only fun because you do not always win and
               | almost proportionally so... If you get better you get to
               | play better games against better opponents.
               | 
               | The win or loss is ancillary to the experience for me.
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | >The win or loss is ancillary to the experience for me.
               | 
               | Maybe because I primarily play sports and not chess but
               | this attitude is completely foreign and mystifying to me.
               | 
               | Don't you feel bad when you lose? Why would you purposely
               | engage in an ELO system that results in you feeling bad
               | after 50% of games, and never gives you a sense of
               | progress?
               | 
               | Isn't that profoundly discouraging?
               | 
               | Do you think Tiger Woods or Leo Messi wish they won fewer
               | matches? Like I just can't get myself into a headspace
               | where you're out for competition but are satisfied with a
               | 50% win rate.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | The ELO system does give you a sense of process.
               | Continuing to beat up weak players does not give you
               | progress. It makes you the one eyed king of the blind.
               | 
               | Do you think professional athletes like Woods and Messi
               | are stupid because they could be playing in Farm League
               | and winning every time against scrubs?
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | >The ELO system does give you a sense of process.
               | 
               | By definition it does not, unless your definition of
               | progress is "number go up".
               | 
               | >Do you think professional athletes are stupid because
               | they could be playing in Little League and winning every
               | time against kids?
               | 
               | So let me get this straight: are you seriously suggesting
               | that you don't understand the difference between e.g. the
               | format of the NHL or the FIFA world cup, and playing
               | against literal children to pad one's win rate?
               | 
               | Because I think you're probably not arguing in good faith
               | with that last comment. Time for me to duck out of this
               | conversation.
        
               | Retric wrote:
               | Progress is in the quality of the games not just an
               | irrelevant number.
               | 
               | If you have a major skill gap, games become boring. Try
               | playing Martin bot for 3 hours.
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | I honestly don't understand your point and do understand
               | his, and definitely don't understand why you took it so
               | aggressively.
               | 
               | All he's saying is it's boring to win all the time.
        
               | hn3er1q wrote:
               | It feels bad to loose but you also need the wins to feel
               | good. Beating a low ELO player is about as fun as beating
               | small kids at basketball or something. For me it's not
               | the win/loss that drives me but making fewer mistakes. If
               | I loose a game where my opponent punished a minor
               | mistake, fair enough, that took skill and I'll learn from
               | it and I don't feel bad. But if I loose because I made a
               | blunder (obvious tactical error) that sucks and I hate
               | that.
        
               | refulgentis wrote:
               | Because that's not a Nash equilibrium: for every extra
               | bit of fun you have, someone else has notfun, and thus
               | has an incentive to switch their strategy (play on
               | another site)
        
               | omegaham wrote:
               | You can always play in tournaments to figure out where
               | you rank compared to a larger population!
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | Indeed I much prefer a tournament format.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | You would probably prefer the game Shooting Fish in a
               | Barrel over the game Chess.
               | 
               | Winning half the time is better because each of those
               | wins means far far more than winning against bad players.
               | 
               | Playing down is only fun for insecure, unambitious
               | people. If winning is the fun part, just cheat, don't
               | seek out bad players to play against. Playing against bad
               | players makes you bad at chess.
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | Edit: never mind you're the same guy constructing
               | strawman arguments in the other thread
        
               | wslh wrote:
               | I haven't read this thread in that way: if you want to
               | improve your skills that is great, it is your choice but
               | you should know, realistically speaking, that at certain
               | level you cannot improve anymore in your lifetime, except
               | if you are part of the elite.
        
               | spiritplumber wrote:
               | I stopped enjoying chess because a game in which you
               | always lose is no fun; the only winning move is not to
               | play.
        
               | ANewFormation wrote:
               | His memory is definitely rivaled. During the recent speed
               | chess championships broadcast they had Magnus, Hikaru,
               | Alireza, and some other top players play some little
               | games testing memory, response rate, and so on.
               | 
               | The memory game involved memorizing highlighted circles
               | on a grid so even something ostesibly chess adjacent.
               | Magnus did not do particularly well. Even when playing a
               | blindfold sim against 'just' 5 people (the record is 48)
               | he lost track of the positions (slightly) multiple times
               | and would eventually lose 2 of the games on time.
               | 
               | But where Magnus is completely unrivaled is in intuition.
               | His intuition just leads him in a better direction faster
               | than other top players. This is both what makes him so
               | unstoppable in faster time controls, and also so
               | dangerous in obscure openings where he may have
               | objectively 'meh' positions, but ones where the better
               | player will still win, and that better player is just
               | about always him.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | Short term memory is extremely different from lifelong
               | memory.
        
               | ANewFormation wrote:
               | For sure, but 'memory' as people think of it plays a
               | fairly small role in chess - mostly relegated to opening
               | preparation which is quite short term - watch any player,
               | including Magnus, stream and they all constantly forget
               | or mix up opening theory in various lines. But of course
               | if you expect to play a e.g. Marshall Gambit in your next
               | game then you'll review those lines shortly before your
               | game.
               | 
               | Instead people think players have this enormous cache of
               | memorized positions in their minds where they know the
               | optimal move, but it's more about lots of ideas and
               | patterns, which then show themselves immediately when you
               | look at a position.
               | 
               | Watch any world class player solve puzzles and you'll
               | find they have often solved it before 'you' (you being
               | any person under master level) have even been able to
               | figure out where all the pieces are. And it's not like
               | they've ever seen the exact position before (at least not
               | usually), but they've developed such an extreme intuition
               | that the position just instantly reveals itself.
               | 
               | So one could call this some sort of memory as I suspect
               | you're doing here with 'lifelong memory', but I think
               | intuition is a far more precise term.
        
               | vlovich123 wrote:
               | While Magnus has a very strong memory (as do all players
               | at that caliber) his intuition is regarded by others and
               | himself as his strongest quality and he constantly talks
               | about how an intuitive player he is compared with others.
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-gw6ChKKoo
        
             | nordsieck wrote:
             | > It does not take away how good he is
             | 
             | Honestly, your anecdote makes me respect him even more.
             | 
             | Few people go to those lengths to prepare.
        
               | llamaimperative wrote:
               | I would presume almost every chess grandmaster does the
               | same, no? And in that case there's nothing particularly
               | genius in this stroke.
               | 
               | Maybe doesn't reduce my image of any individual player,
               | but does reduce the image of the game itself.
        
               | drivers99 wrote:
               | I had a brief rabbit hole about chess at the beginning of
               | this year and found out a few things pros do to prepare
               | against their opponents. I was trying to remember one
               | specific periodical, but I found it: Chess Informant. 320
               | page paperback (and/or CD! - I see they also have a
               | downloadable version for less[2]) quarterly periodical
               | full of games since the last one. Looks like they're up
               | to volume 161.[1] I suppose pros also get specific games
               | they want sooner than that, especially now with
               | everything being streamed, but anyway. There's a lot more
               | going on in chess that is just as important as the time
               | spent actually playing in the tournament.
               | 
               | [1] https://sahovski.com/Chess-Informant-161-Olympic-
               | Spirit-p695... [2] https://sahovski.com/Chess-
               | Informant-161-DOWNLOAD-VERSION-p6...
        
             | kizer wrote:
             | That's very interesting. However it's like any of the
             | organizations that support competitors at elite levels in
             | all sports. From the doctors, nutritionists, coaches that
             | support Olympic athletes to the "high command" of any NFL
             | team coordinating over headset with one another and the
             | coach, who can even radio the quarterback on the field
             | (don't think there is another sport with this).
        
               | bronson wrote:
               | Auto racing? Even has telemetry.
        
               | maeil wrote:
               | Road cycling as well maybe? Tour de France.
        
             | tejohnso wrote:
             | Do you think that this kind of inorganic requirement is
             | part of the reason he abandoned World Chess?
        
               | tomtomtom777 wrote:
               | No. He did not abandon "World Chess". He is still an
               | active player.
               | 
               | He chooses not to participate in the FIDE World
               | Championship primarily because he doesn't like the
               | format. He prefers a tournament format instead of a long
               | 1-on-1 match against the running champion.
        
           | ANewFormation wrote:
           | Fwiw this is normal in chess nowadays. There was some brief
           | era in chess where everybody was just going down the most
           | critical lines and assuming they could outprepare their
           | opponents, or outplay them if that didn't work out. Kasparov
           | and Fischer are the typical examples of this style.
           | 
           | But computers have made this less practical in modern times
           | simply because it's so easy to lose in these sort of
           | positions to the endless number of comp-prepped novelties
           | which may be both objectively mediocre, but also nary
           | impossible to play against without preparation against a
           | prepared opponent.
           | 
           | So a lot of preparation now a days is about getting positions
           | that may not be the most critical test of an opening, but
           | that lead to interesting positions and where the first player
           | to spring a novelty isn't going to just steamroll the other
           | guy.
           | 
           | So in this brave new world you see things like the Berlin
           | Defense becoming hugely popular while the Najdorf has
           | substantially declined in popularity.
        
           | Sesse__ wrote:
           | It is true that Magnus usually prefers offbeat lines to get
           | out of the opponent's preparation. However, they're rarely
           | very sharp or otherwise tactically complicated; on the
           | contrary, he excels at slow maneuvering in strategic
           | positions (and, as you say, the endgame).
        
         | giraffe_lady wrote:
         | Challenging in the sense that you have to work through
         | positions you're not very practiced at. Not "challenging" in
         | the sense that you might lose the game though.
        
         | tasuki wrote:
         | No it does not.
         | 
         | (Source: I'm European 4 dan. I wipe the go board with weaker
         | players playing whatever unconventional moves they like.
         | Likewise, I get crushed by stronger players, faster than usual
         | if I choose unusual moves. This might work on like the double-
         | digit kyu level...)
        
       | emusan wrote:
       | There is hope for us lowly humans!
        
       | throwaway81523 wrote:
       | From 2022, revised 2023, I may have seen it before and forgotten.
       | It is pretty interesting. I wonder how well the approach works
       | against chess engines, at least Leela-style.
        
       | thiago_fm wrote:
       | I bet that there's a similarity between this and what happens to
       | LLM hallucinations.
       | 
       | At some point we will realize that AI will never be perfect, it
       | will just have much better precision than us.
        
         | kachapopopow wrote:
         | I honestly see hallucinations as an absolute win, it's
         | attempting to (predict/'reason') information from the training
         | data it has.
        
           | voidfunc wrote:
           | I don't think I see them as a win, but they're easily dealt
           | with. AI will need analysts at the latter stage to evaluate
           | the outputs but that will be a relatively short-lived
           | problem.
        
             | bubaumba wrote:
             | > I don't think I see them as a win
             | 
             | Unavoidable, probably
             | 
             | > but they're easily dealt with. AI will need analysts at
             | the latter stage to evaluate the outputs but that will be a
             | relatively short-lived problem
             | 
             | That solves only to some degree. Hallucinations may happen
             | at this stage too. Then either correct answer can get
             | rejected or false pass through.
        
           | zdragnar wrote:
           | I think this is a misuse of the term hallucination.
           | 
           | When most people talk about AI hallucinating, they're
           | referring to output which violates some desired constraints.
           | 
           | In the context of chess, this would be making an invalid
           | move, or upgrading a knight to a queen.
           | 
           | In other contexts, some real examples are fabricating court
           | cases and legal precedent (several lawyers have gotten in
           | trouble here), or a grocery store recipe generator
           | recommending mixing bleach and ammonia for a delightful
           | cocktail.
           | 
           | None of these hallucinations are an attempt to reason about
           | anything. This is why some people oppose using the term
           | hallucination- it is an anthropomorphizing term that gives
           | too much credit to the AI.
           | 
           | We can tighten the band of errors with more data or compute
           | efficiency or power, but in the search for generic AI, this
           | is a dead end.
        
             | wat10000 wrote:
             | It's weird because there's no real difference between
             | "hallucinations" and other output.
             | 
             | LLMs are prediction engines. Given the text so far, what's
             | most likely to come next? In that context, there's very
             | little difference between citing a real court case and
             | citing something that sounds like a real court case.
             | 
             | The weird thing is that they're capable of producing any
             | useful output at all.
        
         | bubaumba wrote:
         | > it will just have much better precision than us.
         | 
         | and much faster with the right hardware. And that's enough if
         | AI can do in seconds what humans takes years. With o3 the price
         | is only the limit, looks like.
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | "Not chess, Mr. Spock. Poker!"
        
       | tantalor wrote:
       | > You beat him!
       | 
       | >> No sir, it is a stalemate.
       | 
       | > What did you do?
       | 
       | >> I was playing for a standoff; a draw. While Kolrami was
       | dedicated to winning, I was able to pass up obvious avenues of
       | advancement and settle for a balance. Theoretically, I should be
       | able to challenge him indefinitely.
       | 
       | > Then you have beaten him!
       | 
       | >> In the strictest sense, I did not win.
       | 
       | > (groans) Data!
       | 
       | >> I busted him up.
       | 
       | > (everybody claps)
        
         | cwillu wrote:
         | You... have made a _mockery_ of me.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.
           | 
           | That's not a weakness.
           | 
           | That's life.
        
             | cwillu wrote:
             | But, knowing that he knows that we know that he knows, he
             | might choose to return to his usual pattern.
        
         | taneq wrote:
         | No idea if they did this on purpose but this is exactly what
         | can happen with board game AIs when they know they will win.
         | Unless the evaluation function explicitly promotes winning
         | _sooner_ they will get into an unbeatable position and then
         | just fardle around because they have no reason to win _now_ if
         | they know they can do it later.
        
           | cjbgkagh wrote:
           | Future payoffs are almost always discounted, even if for no
           | other reason than the future has a greater deal of
           | uncertainty. I.e even if it was not explicit which it almost
           | always is, it would still be implicit.
           | 
           | Their conservative style is usually due to having a better
           | fitness function. Humans tend to not be able to model
           | uncertainty as accurately and this results in more aggressive
           | play, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
        
             | taneq wrote:
             | Typically yeah, but when you're trying to make it work at
             | all it can be easy to forget to add a bit of a gradient
             | towards "winning sooner is better". And this happens even
             | at the top level, the example I was thinking about as I
             | typed that was one of the AlphaGo exhibition games against
             | Lee Sedol (the first, maybe?) where it got into a crushing
             | position then seemingly messed around.
        
               | cjbgkagh wrote:
               | There is zero chance AlphaGo devs forgot about
               | discounting. Usually you relax the discount to allow for
               | optimal play, most likely the fitness function flailed a
               | bit in the long tail.
        
             | kqr wrote:
             | Indeed. Humans use "points ahead" as a proxy for "chance of
             | win" so we tend to play lines that increase our lead more,
             | even when they are a tiny bit riskier. Good software does
             | not -- it aims for maximum chance of win, which usually
             | means slower, less aggressive moves to turn uncertain
             | situations into more well-defined ones.
        
           | nilslindemann wrote:
           | Example: https://lichess.org/study/kPWZgp6s/nwqy2Hwg
        
           | gweinberg wrote:
           | Doesn't the board get filled up with stones? I could see how
           | a go player might think a win is a win so it doesn't mater
           | how many stones you win by, but I don;t see how you would go
           | about delaying winning.
        
             | zahlman wrote:
             | >Doesn't the board get filled up with stones?
             | 
             | To some extent, but a player who's way ahead could still
             | have a lot of latitude to play pointless moves without
             | endangering the win. In the case of Go it's generally not
             | so much "delaying winning" as just embarrassing the
             | opponent by playing obviously suboptimal moves (that make
             | it clearer that some key group is dead, for example).
             | 
             | Although it's possible to start irrelevant, time-wasting ko
             | positions - if the opponent accepts the offer to fight over
             | them.
        
           | zahlman wrote:
           | When I was a child, I didn't understand that episode as Data
           | demonstrating his superiority at the game by deliberately
           | keeping it evenly-matched, or that the alien opponent somehow
           | realized that Data could win at any time and simply chose not
           | to.
           | 
           | Rather, I figured Data had come up with some hitherto-unknown
           | strategy that allowed for making the game arbitrarily long;
           | and that the alien had a choice between deliberately losing,
           | accidentally losing (the way the game is depicted, it gets
           | more complex the longer you play) or continuing to play
           | (where an android wouldn't be limited by biology). (No, I
           | didn't phrase my understanding like that, or speak it aloud.)
        
         | dataviz1000 wrote:
         | Wasn't this the plot to War Games (1983)?
        
           | ncr100 wrote:
           | Q: If the AIs are trained on adversarial policies, will this
           | strategy also start to fail in these game-playing scenarios?
           | 
           | EDIT: Discussed later on
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42503110
        
             | renewiltord wrote:
             | > _The core vulnerability uncovered by our attack persists
             | even in KataGo agents adversarially trained to defend
             | against our attack_
        
               | ncr100 wrote:
               | Thanks!
        
       | billforsternz wrote:
       | This seems amazing at first sight. It's probably just me, but I
       | find the paper to be very hard to understand even though I know a
       | little bit about Go and Go AI and a lot about chess and chess AI.
       | They seem to expend the absolute minimum amount of effort on
       | describing what they did and how it can possibly work,
       | unnecessarily using unexplained jargon to more or less mask the
       | underlying message. I can almost see through the veil they've
       | surrounded their (remarkable and quite simple?) ideas with, but
       | not quite.
        
         | dragontamer wrote:
         | https://slideslive.com/39006680/adversarial-policies-beat-su...
         | 
         | Seems to be a good intro.
         | 
         | Go uniquely has long periods of dead-man walking, as I like to
         | call it. Your group might be dead on turn 30, but your opponent
         | won't formally kill the group until turn 150 or later.
         | 
         | If your opponent knows the truth all the way back in turn30,
         | while you are led down the wrong path for those hundreds of
         | turns, you will almost certainly lose.
         | 
         | This adversarial AI tricks AlphaGo/KataGo into such situations.
         | And instead of capitalizing on it, they focus on the trickery
         | knowing that KataGo reliably fails to understand the situation
         | (aka it's better to make a suboptimal play to keep KataGo
         | tricked / glitched, rather than play an optimal move that may
         | reveal to KataGo the failure of understanding).
         | 
         | Even with adversarial training (IE: KataGo training on this
         | flaw), the flaw remains and it's not clear why.
         | 
         | ------
         | 
         | It appears that this glitch (the cyclical group) is easy enough
         | for an amateur player to understand (I'm ranked around 10kyu,
         | which is estimated to be the same level of effort as 1500Elo
         | chess. Reasonably practiced but nothing special).
         | 
         | So it seems like I as a human (even at 10kyu) could defeat
         | AlphaGo/KataGo with a bit of practice.
        
           | hinkley wrote:
           | Aji is the concept of essentially making lemonaid from lemons
           | by using the existence of the dead stones to put pressure on
           | the surrounding pieces and claw back some of your losses.
           | 
           | Because they haven't been captured yet they reduce the safety
           | (liberties) of nearby stones. And until those are fully
           | settled an incorrect move could rescue them, and the effort
           | put into preventing that may cost points in the defense.
        
           | billforsternz wrote:
           | Thank you. So the attack somehow sets up a situation where
           | AlphaGo/KataGo is the dead man walking? It doesn't realise at
           | move 30 it has a group that is dead, and continues not to
           | realise that until (close to the time that?) the group is
           | formally surrounded at move 150?
           | 
           | I still don't really understand, because this makes it sound
           | as if AlphaGo/KataGo is just not very good at Go!
        
             | dragontamer wrote:
             | To be clear, this is an adversarial neural network that
             | automatically looks for these positions.
             | 
             | So we aren't talking about 'one' Deadman walking position,
             | but multiple ones that this research group searches for,
             | categorizes and studies to see if AlphaGo / KataGo can
             | learn / defend against them with more training.
             | 
             | I'd argue that Go is specifically a game where the absurdly
             | long turn counts and long-term thinking allows for these
             | situations to ever come up in the first place. It's why the
             | game is and always fascinated players.
             | 
             | -------
             | 
             | Or in other words: if you know that a superhuman AI has a
             | flaw in its endgame calculation, then play in a deeply
             | 'dead man walking' manner, tricking the AI into thinking
             | it's winning when in truth its losing for hundreds of
             | moves.
             | 
             | MCTS is strong because it plays out reasonable games and
             | foresees and estimates endgame positions. If the neural
             | nets oracle is just plain wrong in some positions, it leads
             | to incredible vulnerabilities.
        
               | billforsternz wrote:
               | I think I'm starting to see after reading these replies
               | and some of the linked material. Basically the things
               | that confused me most about the rules of go when I first
               | looked at it are playing a role in creating the attack
               | surface: How do we decide to stop the game? How do we
               | judge whether this (not completely surrounded) stone is
               | dead? Why don't we play it out? Etc.
        
               | zahlman wrote:
               | Most rulesets allow you to "play it out" without losing
               | points. Humans don't do it because it's boring and
               | potentially insulting or obnoxious.
               | 
               | Judging whether something "is dead" emerges from a
               | combination of basic principles and skill at the game.
               | Formally, we can distinguish concepts of unconditionally
               | alive or "pass-alive" (cannot be captured by any legal
               | sequence of moves) and unconditionally dead (cannot be
               | _made unconditionally alive_ by any sequence of moves),
               | in the sense of Benson 's algorithm
               | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson%27s_algorithm_(Go)
               | , not the only one with that name apparently). But
               | players are more generally concerned with "cannot be
               | captured in alternating play" (i.e., if the opponent
               | starts first, it's always possible to reach a pass-alive
               | state; ideally the player has read out how to do so) and
               | "cannot be defended in alternating play" (i.e., not in
               | the previous state, and cannot be made so with any single
               | move).
               | 
               | Most commonly, an "alive" string of stones either already
               | has two separate "eyes" or can be shown to reach such a
               | configuration inevitably. (Eyes are surrounded points
               | such that neither is a legal move for the opponent;
               | supposing that playing on either fails to capture the
               | string or any other string - then it is impossible to
               | capture the string, because stones are played one at a
               | time, and capturing the string would require covering
               | both spaces at once.)
               | 
               | In rarer cases, a "seki" (English transliteration of
               | Japanese - also see https://senseis.xmp.net/?Seki)
               | arises, where both player's strings are kept alive by
               | each others' weakness: any attempt by either player to
               | capture results in losing a capturing race (because the
               | empty spaces next to the strings are shared, such that
               | covering the opponent's "liberty" also takes one from
               | your own string). I say "arises", but typically the seki
               | position is forced (as the least bad option for the
               | opponent) by one player, in a part of the board where the
               | opponent has an advantage and living by forming two eyes
               | would be impossible.
               | 
               | Even rarer forms of life may be possible depending on the
               | ruleset, as well as global situations that prevent one
               | from reducing the position to a sum of scores of groups.
               | For example, if there is no superko restriction, a
               | "triple ko" (https://senseis.xmp.net/?TripleKo) can
               | emerge - three separate ko (https://senseis.xmp.net/?Ko)
               | positions, such that every move must capture in the
               | "next" ko in a cycle or else lose the game immediately.
               | 
               | It gets much more complex than that
               | (https://senseis.xmp.net/?GoRulesBestiary), although also
               | much rarer. Many positions that challenge rulesets are
               | completely implausible in real play and basically require
               | cooperation between the players to achieve.
        
               | billforsternz wrote:
               | Sorry this is mostly way over my head, but perhaps you
               | can explain something to me that puzzled me when I looked
               | at go 50 odd years ago now.
               | 
               | (Please note, I absolutely do understand life requires
               | two eyes, and why that is so, but my knowledge doesn't
               | extend much further than that).
               | 
               | So hypothetically, if we get to the point where play
               | normally stops, why can't I put a stone into my
               | opponent's territory? I am reducing his territory by 1
               | point. So he will presumably object and take my "dead"
               | stone off, first restoring the balance and then
               | penalising me one point by putting the newly captured
               | stone in my territory. But can't I insist that he
               | actually surrounds the stone before he takes it off? That
               | would take four turns (I would pass each time) costing
               | him 4 points to gain 1. There must be a rule to stop
               | this, but is it easily formally expressed? Or is it a)
               | Complicated or b) Require some handwaving ?
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | > So hypothetically, if we get to the point where play
               | normally stops, why can't I put a stone into my
               | opponent's territory? I am reducing his territory by 1
               | point. So he will presumably object and take my "dead"
               | stone off, first restoring the balance and then
               | penalising me one point by putting the newly captured
               | stone in my territory. But can't I insist that he
               | actually surrounds the stone before he takes it off? That
               | would take four turns (I would pass each time) costing
               | him 4 points to gain 1. There must be a rule to stop
               | this, but is it easily formally expressed? Or is it a)
               | Complicated or b) Require some handwaving ?
               | 
               | There are multiple scoring systems (American, Chinese,
               | and Japanese and a couple of others).
               | 
               | * In Chinese scoring, stones do NOT penalize your score.
               | So they capture your stone and gain +1 point, and lose 0
               | points.
               | 
               | * In American scoring, passing penalizes your score. So
               | you place a stone (ultimately -1 point), they place 4
               | stones (-4 points), but you pass a further 4 points (4x
               | passes == -4 more points). This ends with -4 points to
               | the opponent, but -5 points to you. Effectively +1 point
               | differential.
               | 
               | * In Japanese scoring, the player will declare your stone
               | dead. Because you continue to object the players play it
               | out. Once it has been played out, time is rewound and the
               | state of the stones will be declared what both players
               | now agree (ie: I need 4 stones to kill your stone, if you
               | keep passing I'll kill it).
               | 
               | ---------
               | 
               | So your question is only relevant to Japanese scoring (in
               | the other two systems, you fail to gain any points). And
               | in Japanese scoring, there is the "time rewind" rule for
               | post-game debate. (You play out positions only to
               | determine alive vs dead if there's a debate. This is
               | rarely invoked because nearly everyone can instinctively
               | see alive vs dead).
               | 
               | IE: In Japanese scoring, the game has ended after both
               | players have passed. Time "rewinds" to this point, any
               | "play" is purely for the determination of alive vs dead
               | groups.
               | 
               | In all three cases, playing out such a position is
               | considered a dick move and a waste of everyone's time.
        
               | billforsternz wrote:
               | Than you, a longstanding mystery (for me) solved!
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | Amusingly, the endgame ritual is the same for all styles.
               | 
               | You play every good move. Then you traditionally play the
               | neutral moves (+0 points to either player) to make
               | counting easier. Then the game ends as both players pass.
               | 
               | In Chinese, American, or Japanese scoring, this process
               | works to maximize your endgame score.
        
               | zahlman wrote:
               | Thanks - I've had to do basically this exact explanation
               | countless times before. It'd be nice if there were an
               | _obvious_ place to refer people for this info.
               | 
               | That said, when I teach beginners I teach them Chinese
               | scoring and counting. If they understand the principles
               | it'll be easy enough to adapt later, and it doesn't
               | change strategy in a practical way. They can play it out
               | without worry, it makes more sense from an aesthetic
               | standpoint ("you're trying to have stones on the board
               | and keep them there, or have a place to put them later" -
               | then you only have to explain that you still get points
               | for the eyes you can't fill).
               | 
               | It's also IMX faster to score on 9x9: you can shift the
               | borders around (equally benefiting both players) to make
               | some simple shapes and easily see who has the majority of
               | the area and you aren't worrying about arranging
               | territories into rectangles.
        
               | lupire wrote:
               | Chess is Python and Go is, uh, Go?
        
           | zahlman wrote:
           | This is not a reasonable summary. The adversarial AI is not
           | finding some weird position that relies on KataGo not
           | understanding the status. It's relying, supposedly, on KataGo
           | not understanding the _ruleset_ which uses area scoring and
           | _doesn 't include removing dead stones_ (because in area
           | scoring you _can_ always play it out without losing points,
           | so this is a simple way to avoid disputes between computers,
           | which don 't get bored of it).
           | 
           | I assume that KataGo still has this "flaw" after adversarial
           | training simply because it doesn't overcome the training it
           | has in environments where taking dead stones off the board
           | (or denying them space to make two eyes if you passed every
           | move) isn't expected.
           | 
           | See https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/58127
           | which includes an image of a position the adversarial AI
           | supposedly "won" which even at your level should appear
           | _utterly laughable_. (Sorry, I don 't mean to condescend - I
           | am only somewhere around 1dan myself.)
           | 
           | (ELO is sometimes used in Go ranking, but I don't think it
           | can fairly be compared to chess ranking nor used as a metric
           | for "level of effort".)
        
             | dragontamer wrote:
             | There are multiple examples from this research group.
             | 
             | I believe my discussion above is a reasonable survey of the
             | cyclic attack linked to at the beginning of the website.
             | 
             | https://goattack.far.ai/game-analysis#contents
        
               | roenxi wrote:
               | What we need are more sides to the argument. I'm pretty
               | sure you're both off.
               | 
               | zahlman doesn't seem to have read the part of the paper
               | dealing with cyclic adversaries, but the cyclic adversary
               | strategy doesn't depend on KataGo mis-classifying alive
               | or dead groups over long time horizons. If you watch the
               | example games play out, KataGo kills the stones
               | successfully and is trivially winning for most of the
               | game. It makes a short term & devastating mistake where
               | it doesn't seem to understand that it has a shortage of
               | liberties and lets the adversary kill a huge group in a
               | stupid way.
               | 
               | The mistake KataGo makes doesn't have anything to do with
               | long move horizons, on a long time horizon it still plays
               | excellently. The short horizon is where it mucks up.
        
               | zahlman wrote:
               | I don't suppose you could directly link to a position? It
               | would be interesting to see KataGo make a blunder of the
               | sort you describe, because traditional Go engines were
               | able to avoid them many years ago.
        
               | roenxi wrote:
               | Consider the first diagram in the linked paper (a, pg 2).
               | It is pretty obvious that black could have killed the
               | internal group in the top-right corner at any time for
               | ~26 points. That'd be about enough to tip the game.
               | Instead somehow black's group died giving white ~100
               | points and white wins easily. Black would have had ~50
               | moves to kill the internal group.
               | 
               | Or if you want a replay, try
               | https://goattack.far.ai/adversarial-policy-
               | katago#contents - the last game (KataGo with 10,000,000
               | visits - https://goattack.far.ai/adversarial-policy-
               | katago#10mil_visi...} - game 1 in the table) shows KataGo
               | with a trivially winning position around move 200 that it
               | then throws away with a baffling sequence of about 20
               | moves. I'm pretty sure even as late as move 223 KataGo
               | has an easily winning position, looks like it wins the
               | capture race in the extreme lower left. It would have
               | figured out the game was over by the capture 8 moves
               | later.
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | I see what you mean.
               | 
               | So dead man walking is a bad description. From your
               | perspective it's still KataGo winning but a series of
               | serious blunders that occurs in these attacks positions.
        
         | fipar wrote:
         | Some amount of jargon is needed (in general, not just for this)
         | to optimize communication among experts, but still, your
         | comment reminded me of Pirsig's concept (IIRC introduced in his
         | second book, "Lila") of the "cultural inmune system", as he did
         | bring jargon up in that context too.
         | 
         | I guess, unsurprisingly, for jargon it is as for almost
         | anything else: there's a utility function with one inflection
         | point past which the output value actually becomes less (if the
         | goal is to convey information as clearly as possible, for other
         | goals, I guess the utility function may be exponential ...)
        
       | kizer wrote:
       | You'd think the ability to set up elaborate tricks would imply
       | similar knowledge of the game. And also that highly skilled AI
       | would implicitly include adversarial strategies. Interesting
       | result.
        
         | dragontamer wrote:
         | The existence of KataGo and it's super-AlphaGo / AlphaZero
         | strength is because Go players noticed that AlphaGo can't see
         | ladders.
         | 
         | A simple formation that even mild amateurs must learn to reach
         | the lowest ranks.
         | 
         | KataGo recognizes the flaw and has an explicit ladder solver
         | written in traditional code. It seems like neural networks will
         | never figure out ladders (!!!!!). And it's not clear why such a
         | simple pattern is impossible for deep neural nets to figure
         | out.
         | 
         | I'm not surprised that there are other, deeper patterns that
         | all of these AIs have missed.
        
           | bwfan123 wrote:
           | >It seems like neural networks will never figure out ladders
           | (!!!!!). And it's not clear why such a simple pattern is
           | impossible for deep neural nets to figure out.
           | 
           | this is very interesting (i dont play go) can you elaborate -
           | what is the characteristic of these formations that elude AIs
           | - is it that they dont appear in the self-training or game
           | databases.
        
             | dragontamer wrote:
             | AlphaGo was trained on many human positions, all of which
             | contain numerous ladders.
             | 
             | I don't think anyone knows for sure, but ladders are very
             | calculation heavy. Unlike a lot of positions where Go is
             | played by so called instinct, a ladder switches modes into
             | "If I do X opponent does Y so I do Z.....", almost chess
             | like.
             | 
             | Except it's very easy because there are only 3 or 4 options
             | per step and really only one of those options continues the
             | ladder. So it's this position where a chess-like tree
             | breaks out in the game of Go but far simpler.
             | 
             | You still need to play Go (determining the strength of the
             | overall board and evaluate if the ladder is worth it or if
             | ladder breaker moves are possible/reasonable). But for
             | strictly the ladder it's a simple and somewhat tedious
             | calculation lasting about 20 or so turns on the average.
             | 
             | --------
             | 
             | The thing about ladders is that no one actually plays out a
             | ladder. They just sit there on the board because it's rare
             | for it to play to both players advantages (ladders are
             | sharp: they either favor white or black by significant
             | margins).
             | 
             | So as, say Black, is losing the ladder, Black will NEVER
             | play the ladder. But needs to remember that the ladder is
             | there for the rest of the game.
             | 
             | A ladder breaker is when Black places a piece that maybe in
             | 15 turns (or later) will win the ladder (often while
             | accomplishing something else). So after a ladder breaker,
             | Black is winning the ladder and White should never play the
             | ladder.
             | 
             | So the threat of the ladder breaker changes the game and
             | position severely in ways that can only be seen in the far
             | far future, dozens or even a hundred turns from now. It's
             | outside the realm of computer calculations but yet feasible
             | for humans to understand the implications.
        
             | tasuki wrote:
             | I'd argue it's clear why it's hard for a neural net to
             | figure out.
             | 
             | A ladder is a kind of a mechanical one-way sequence which
             | is quite long to read out. This is easy for humans (it's a
             | one-way street!) but hard for AI (the MCTS prefers to
             | search wide rather than deep). It is easy to tell the
             | neural net as one of its inputs eg "this ladder works" or
             | "this ladder doesn't work" -- in fact that's exactly what
             | KataGo does.
             | 
             | See the pictures for more details about ladders:
             | https://senseis.xmp.net/?Ladder
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | Doesn't MCTS deeply AND broadly search though?
               | 
               | Traditional MCTS searches all the way to endgame and
               | estimates how the current position leads to either win or
               | loss. I'm not sure what the latest and greatest is but
               | those % chance to win numbers are literally a search
               | result over possible endgames IIRC.
               | 
               | I guess I'd assume that MCTS should see ladders and play
               | at least some of them out.
        
               | tasuki wrote:
               | The short ones, sure. The long ones, it's hard for pure
               | MCTS to... keep the ladder straight?
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | I don't know that much about MCTS, but I'd think that
               | since a ladder requires dozens of moves in a row before
               | making any real difference to either player's position,
               | they just don't get sampled if you are sampling randomly
               | and don't know about ladders. You might find that all
               | sampled positions lead to you losing the ladder, so you
               | might as well spend the moves capturing some of your
               | opponent's stones elsewhere?
        
             | earnestinger wrote:
             | https://senseis.xmp.net/?Ladder
             | 
             | (Kind of like wikipedia for go players)
        
           | erikerikson wrote:
           | Some of our neutral networks learned ladders. You forgot the
           | "a" standing for artificial. Even so amended, "never"? Good
           | luck betting on that belief.
        
           | scotty79 wrote:
           | > And it's not clear why such a simple pattern is impossible
           | for deep neural nets to figure out.
           | 
           | Maybe solving ladders is iterative? Once they make chain-of-
           | thought version of AlphaZero it might figure them out.
        
             | dwaltrip wrote:
             | It's very iterative and mechanical. I would often struggle
             | with ladders in blitz games because they require you to
             | project a diagonal line across a large board with extreme
             | precision. Misjudging by half a square could be fatal. And
             | you also must reassess the ladder whenever a stone is
             | placed near that invisible diagonal line.
             | 
             | That's a great idea. I think some sort of CoT would
             | definitely help.
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | These are Go AIs.
               | 
               | The MCTS search is itself a chain-of-thought.
               | 
               | Or in the case of KataGo, a dedicated Ladder-solver that
               | serves as the input to the neural network is more than
               | sufficient. IIRC all ladders of liberties 4 or less are
               | solved by the dedicated KataGo solver.
               | 
               | It's not clear why these adversarial examples pop up yet
               | IMO. It's not an issue of search depth or breadth either,
               | it seems like an instinct thing.
        
               | dwaltrip wrote:
               | Can MCTS dynamically determine that it needs to analyze a
               | certain line to a much higher depth than normal due to
               | the specifics of the situation?
               | 
               | That's the type of flexible reflection that is needed. I
               | think most people would agree that the hard-coded ladder
               | solver in Katago is not ideal, and feels like a dirty
               | hack. The system should learn when it needs to do special
               | analysis, not have us tell it when to. It's good that it
               | works, but it'd be better if it didn't need us to hard-
               | code such knowledge.
               | 
               | Humans are capable of realizing what a ladder is on their
               | own (even if many learn from external sources). And it
               | definitely isn't hard-coded into us :)
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | Traditional MCTS analyzes each line all the way to
               | endgame.
               | 
               | I believe neural-net based MCTS (ex: AlphaZero and
               | similar) use the neural-net to determine how deep any
               | line should go. (Ex: which moves are worth exploring?
               | Well, might as well have that itself part of the training
               | / inference neural net).
        
               | scotty79 wrote:
               | > The MCTS search is itself a chain-of-thought.
               | 
               | I'm not quite sure it's a fair characterization.
               | 
               | Either way...
               | 
               | MCTS evaluates current position using predictions of
               | future positions.
               | 
               | To understand value of ladders the algorithm would need
               | iteratively analyse just the current layout of the pieces
               | on the board.
               | 
               | Apparently the value of ladders is hard to infer from
               | probabilisticrvsample of predictions of the future.
               | 
               | Ladders were accidental human discovery just because our
               | attention is drawn to patterns. It just happens to be
               | that they are valuable and can be mechanistically
               | analyzed and evaluated. AI so far struggles with 1 shot
               | outputting solutions that would require running small
               | iterative program to calculate.
        
       | kevinwang wrote:
       | [2022]
        
       | Upvoter33 wrote:
       | "Our results demonstrate that even superhuman AI systems may
       | harbor surprising failure modes." This is true but really is an
       | empty conclusion. The result has no meaning for future
       | "superintelligences"; they may or may not have these kinds of
       | "failure modes".
        
         | Kapura wrote:
         | On the contrary, this is the most important part of the thesis.
         | They are arguing not only that this AI was vulnerable to this
         | specific attack, but that any AI model is vulnerable to attack
         | vectors that the original builders cannot predict or
         | preemptively guard against. if you say "well, a
         | superintelligence won't be vulnerable" you are putting your
         | faith in magic.
        
         | dragontamer wrote:
         | They developed a system / algorithm that reliably defeats the
         | most powerful Go AI, and is a simple enough system for a
         | trained human to execute.
         | 
         | Surely that's important? It was thought that AlphaGo and KataGo
         | were undefeatable by humans.
        
         | aithrowawaycomm wrote:
         | It's more a lesson about the dangers of transferring an
         | objectively true statement:                 "MuZero can beat
         | any professional Go player"
         | 
         | to a squishy but not false statement:                 "MuZero
         | is an AI which is superhuman at Go"
         | 
         | to a statement which is basically wrong:
         | "MuZero has superhuman intelligence in the domain of Go."
        
       | vouaobrasil wrote:
       | Not so encouraging. This paper will just be used to incorporate
       | defense against adversarial strategies in Go playing AIs. A
       | simple curiosity, but one reflective of the greater state of
       | affairs in AI development which is rather dismal.
        
         | brazzy wrote:
         | According to the abstract, "The core vulnerability uncovered by
         | our attack persists even in KataGo agents adversarially trained
         | to defend against our attack."
        
           | vouaobrasil wrote:
           | Well, that does not apply to future Go AIs for all of time.
        
             | kadoban wrote:
             | Okay, how does one protect against it then? Why would this
             | _not_ apply to any future ones?
        
       | 383toast wrote:
       | NOTE: this is a july 2023 paper, the defense paper in september
       | 2024 is https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12843
        
         | 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
         | > We find that though some of these defenses protect against
         | previously discovered attacks, none withstand freshly trained
         | adversaries.
        
       | casey2 wrote:
       | Reminds me of how even after deep blue chess players learned
       | better anti computer strategies. Because the space of Go is so
       | much larger there are likely many more anti computer strategies
       | like this. It exploits the eval function in the same way
       | 
       | Like chess more compute will win out, as has already been shown.
       | I will remind everyone that elo is a measure of wins and losses
       | not difficulty, conflating the two will lead to poor reasoning.
        
         | snovv_crash wrote:
         | Elo also takes into account the strength of the opponent, which
         | is a pretty good proxy for difficulty.
        
       | nilslindemann wrote:
       | Here have some edge cases for chess, fortresses. The first three
       | are "0.0" in the fourth black wins.
       | 
       | 8/8/8/1Pk5/2Pn3p/5BbP/6P1/5K1R w - - 0 1 (white can not free the
       | rook)
       | 
       | 1B4r1/1p6/pPp5/P1Pp1k2/3Pp3/4Pp1p/5P1P/5K2 b - - 0 1 (the rook
       | can not enter white's position)
       | 
       | kqb5/1p6/1Pp5/p1Pp4/P2Pp1p1/K3PpPp/5P1B/R7 b - - 0 1 (Rook to h1.
       | King to g1, Queen can not enter via a6)
       | 
       | 2nnkn2/2nnnn2/2nnnn2/8/8/8/3QQQ2/3QKQ2 w - - 0 1 (the knights
       | advance as block, so that attacked knights are protected twice)
       | 
       | In the first both Stockfish and Lc0 think white is better
       | (slightly on a deep ply). In the second and in the third they
       | think black wins. Lc0 understands the fourth (applause),
       | Stockfish does not.
        
         | diziet wrote:
         | Links to these fortresses to those without familiarity with
         | chess:
         | 
         | https://lichess.org/analysis/standard/8/8/8/1Pk5/2Pn3p/5BbP/...
         | https://lichess.org/analysis/fromPosition/1B4r1/1p6/pPp5/P1P...
         | https://lichess.org/analysis/fromPosition/kqb5/1p6/1Pp5/p1Pp...
         | https://lichess.org/analysis/fromPosition/2nnkn2/2nnnn2/2nnn...
        
         | FartyMcFarter wrote:
         | I'm not surprised that engines aren't tuned / haven't learned
         | to evaluate positions like the last one (and probably most of
         | the others) - there's absolutely no way this kind of position
         | shows up in a real chess game.
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | The last one, for sure won't happen. The two with the crazy
           | pawn chains are unlikely, but these extremely locked
           | structures do occasionally occur. And the first one is
           | actually pretty plausible. The situation with the king on f1
           | and the rook stuck in the corner is fairly thematic in some
           | opening.It's just not well suited for engine analysis and
           | fairly trivial for humans because we can eliminate large
           | swathes of game tree via logic.
           | 
           | I.e. Assuming the black bishop and knight never move, we can
           | see the kingside pawns will never move either. And the king
           | will only ever be able to shuffle between f1 and g1.
           | Therefore we can deduce the rook can never make a useful
           | move. Now the only pieces that can make meaningful moves are
           | the two connected passed pawns on the queenside, and the
           | light-square bishop. Assume there was no bishop. The king can
           | simply shuffle between b6 and c5, and the pawns are
           | contained. Can the white bishop change any of this? No,
           | because those two squares are dark squares, and in fact all
           | of the black pieces are on dark squares. So the white bishop
           | is useless. Ergo, no progress can be made. We've eliminated
           | all the possible continuations based on a very shallow search
           | using constraint based reasoning and basic deduction.
           | 
           | Engines can't do any of this. No one has found a generalised
           | algorithm to do this sort of thing(it's something I spend a
           | silly amount of time trying to think up, and I've gotten
           | nowhere with it). All they can do is explore paths to future
           | possible positions, assign them a heuristic evaluation. And
           | choose the best path they find.
           | 
           | Although, I haven't actually tried to analyse position 1 with
           | stockfish. I feel like on sufficient depth, it should find a
           | forced repetition. Or the 50 move rule. Though it might waste
           | a ton of time looking at meaningless bishop moves. Naively,
           | I'd expect it to do 49 pointless bishop moves and king
           | shuffles, then move a pawn, losing it, then another 49 moves,
           | lose the other pawn. Then finally another 50 moves until
           | running into 50 move rule. So back of the envelope, it would
           | need to search to 150ply before concluding it's a draw.
           | Although pruning and might actually mean it gets there
           | significantly faster.
        
             | prmph wrote:
             | > Engines can't do any of this. No one has found a
             | generalised algorithm to do this sort of thing(it's
             | something I spend a silly amount of time trying to think
             | up, and I've gotten nowhere with it).
             | 
             | This is exactly why current AI cannot be said to actually
             | think in the same fashion as humans, and why AI is very
             | unlikey to reach AGI
        
       | zahlman wrote:
       | Oh, no, not _this_ paper again.
       | 
       | Please see https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/58127/
       | for reference. The first picture there shows a game supposedly
       | "won by Black", due to a refusal to acknowledge that Black's
       | stones are hopelessly dead everywhere except the top-right of the
       | board. The "exploit" that the adversarial AI has found is, in
       | effect, to convince KataGo to pass in this position, and then
       | claim that White has no territory. It doesn't do this by claiming
       | it could possibly make life with alternating play; it does so, in
       | effect, by _citing a ruleset that doesn 't include the idea of
       | removing dead stones_ (https://tromp.github.io/go.html) and
       | expects everything to be played out (using area scoring) for as
       | long as either player isn't satisfied.
       | 
       | Tromp comments: "As a practical shortcut, the following amendment
       | allows dead stone removal" - but this isn't part of the
       | formalization, and anyway the adversarial AI could just not
       | agree, and it's up to KataGo to make pointless moves until it
       | does. To my understanding, the formalization exists in large part
       | because early Go programs often _couldn 't_ reliably tell when
       | the position was fully settled (just like beginner players). It's
       | also relevant on a theoretical level for some algorithms - which
       | would like to know with certainty what the score is in any given
       | position, but would theoretically have to already play Go
       | perfectly in order to compute that.
       | 
       | (If you're interested in why so many rulesets exist, what kinds
       | of strange situations would make the differences matter, etc.,
       | definitely check out the work of Robert Jasiek, a relatively
       | strong amateur European player:
       | https://home.snafu.de/jasiek/rules.html . Much of this was
       | disregarded by the Go community at the time, because it's
       | _incredibly_ pedantic; but that 's exactly what's necessary when
       | it comes to rules disputes and computers.)
       | 
       | One of the authors of the paper posted on the Stack Exchange
       | question and argued
       | 
       | > Now this does all feel rather contrived from a human
       | perspective. But remember, KataGo was trained with this rule set,
       | and configured to play with it. It doesn't know that the "human"
       | rules of Go are any more important than Tromp-Taylor.
       | 
       | But I don't see anything to substantiate that claim. All sorts of
       | Go bots are happy to play against humans in online
       | implementations of the game, under a variety of human-oriented
       | rulesets; and they pass in natural circumstances, and then the
       | online implementation (sometimes using a different AI) proposes
       | group status that is almost always correct (and matches the group
       | status that the human player modeled in order to play that way).
       | As far as I know, if a human player deliberately tries to claim
       | the status is wrong, an AI will either hold its ground or request
       | to resume play and demonstrate the status more clearly. In the
       | position shown at the Stack Exchange link, even in territory
       | scoring without pass stones, White could afford dozens of plays
       | inside the territory (unfairly costing 1 point each) in order to
       | make the White stones all pass-alive and deny any mathematical
       | possibility of the Black stones reaching that status. (Sorry,
       | there really isn't a way to explain that last sentence better
       | without multiple pages of the background theory I linked and/or
       | alluded to above.)
        
         | benchaney wrote:
         | There are two strategies described in this paper. The cyclic
         | adversary, and the pass adversary. You are correct that the
         | pass adversary is super dumb. It is essentially exploiting a
         | loophole in a version of the rules that Katago doesn't actually
         | support. This is such a silly attack that IMO the paper would
         | be a lot more compelling if they had just left it out.
         | 
         | That said, the cyclic adversary is a legitimate weakness in
         | Katago, and I found it quite impressive.
        
           | zahlman wrote:
           | What is "cyclic" about the adversarial strategy, exactly? Is
           | it depending on a superko rule? That might potentially be
           | interesting, and explanatory. Positions where superko matters
           | are extremely rare in human games, so it might be hard to
           | seed training data. It probably wouldn't come up in self-
           | play, either.
        
             | benchaney wrote:
             | No, it isn't related to superko. It has to do with Katago
             | misidentifying the status of groups that are wrapped around
             | an opposing group. I assume the name cyclic has to do with
             | the fact that the groups look like circles. There are
             | images in the paper, but it is a straight forward misread
             | of the life and death status of groups that are
             | unambiguously dead regardless of rule set.
        
         | immibis wrote:
         | Oh, no, not _this_ response again.
         | 
         | The AI is evaluated on the ruleset the AI is trained to play
         | on, which is a Go variant designed to be easier for computers
         | to implement.
         | 
         | The fact that the AI might have won if using a different
         | ruleset is completely irrelevant.
         | 
         | The fact that the AI can be adapted to play in other rulesets,
         | and this is frequently done when playing against human players,
         | is irrelevant.
        
           | benchaney wrote:
           | It's not the same rule set though. The rule set they
           | evaluated the AI on isn't one of the ones that it supports.
           | 
           | Edit: This is confusing for some people because there are
           | essentially two rule sets with the same name, but Tromp-
           | Taylor rules as commonly implemented for actual play
           | (including by Katago) involves dead stone removal, where as
           | Tromp Taylor rules as defined for Computer Science research
           | doesn't. One might argue that the latter is the "real" Tromp
           | Taylor rules (whatever that means), but at that point it is
           | obvious that you are rules lawyering with the engine authors
           | rather than doing anything that could reasonably be
           | considered adversarial policy research.
        
             | zahlman wrote:
             | Thank you for the clarification.
        
       | mNovak wrote:
       | FYI: discussion [1] of this attack from late 2022, notably
       | including lengthy discussion from the developer (hexahedron /
       | lightvector) of KataGo, probably the most widely used super-human
       | Go AI.
       | 
       | Link is mid-thread, because the earlier version of the paper was
       | less interesting than the revision later on.
       | 
       | [1] https://forums.online-go.com/t/potential-rank-inflation-
       | on-o...
        
       | leoc wrote:
       | Are there or may there be similar "attacks" on the LLM chatbots?
        
         | canjobear wrote:
         | Yes, this is an area of active research. For example
         | https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-10-25-adv-attack-llm...
        
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