Item — HN Reader

[SPOILERS] To me there are five super interesting points in this video.

1. The arrogance/confidence that people had towards AlphaGo assuming that it was not going to be competitive.

2. The lack of understanding tt even the programmers had for the game. At one point the devs were saying "I don't even know if that's a good move or not", yet their program is playing at superhuman play.

3. The amazement that commentators and other players experienced when AlphaGo performed move 37 in game 2.

4. The disappointment experienced by everyone when they came to the realization after game 3 the computer won.

5. The confusion when the computers neural network fails in game 4 and everyone (except the engineering team who sees the probabilities) is confused about whether the machines play is brilliant or terrible.

1 comments

Just random thoughts:

> 1. The arrogance/confidence that people had towards AlphaGo assuming that it was not going to be competitive.

This is pure stupidity. Those people didn't realize the nature of the game. Go is a (large) confined space, which, by nature, can be brute-forced for the best answer. ML was needed simply to trim and optimize search tree, to find the best local maxima from a broader range (than other AIs).

> 2. The lack of understanding tt even the programmers had for the game. At one point the devs were saying "I don't even know if that's a good move or not", yet their program is playing at superhuman play.

You can't even predict solutions from a simple DFS. Right things are not always obvious nor intuitive.

> 5. The confusion when the computers neural network fails in game 4 and everyone (except the engineering team who sees the probabilities) is confused about whether the machines play is brilliant or terrible.

It's likely that AlphaGo didn't look beyond "horizon"[1], and only realized it's losing after a dozen moves. In this sense, move 78 in game 4 itself is more amazing than move 37 in game 2. The only reason why the latter is uncommon is it's believed that it's difficult to build house in the sky(middle), thus one should keep stones close to ground(border), but that naturally depends on the situation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_effect