This is of course all very, very impressive, but it would be great to see more details on this. We are told AZ only started with the basic rules. What was included in the "basic rules"? How were they codified? The engine looks at 80.000 positions at second, so obviously it has some evaluation function. What is the position evaluation function? Presumably it was codified in some way in the beginning, and then got improved by the training period? It would be very interesting to see the first 100 games, or so, the engine it played against itself.
Good list. However, I notice lack of movies from such great directors as Wim Wenders and Andrei Tarkovsky. Well, I guess it is difficult to put together a list like this anyway.
Great game and amazing series/match. This last one was absolutely nail biting. My hat off to the AlphaGo team and to Mr. Lee Sedol. Sedol showed incredible fighting spirit and stamina. Just imagine sitting through a 5 hour game like that last one, with full concentration all the time. And seeing the expression of exhaustion and disappointment on Sedol's face after last moves and his resignation. Phew... I bet that he came in rather confident into this last game, after beating AlphaGo in the fourth, figuring he had found a weakness. And he seemed to have a rather good start, securing a decent territory in the lower right corner.
We can all marvel at the machine/software the DeepMind team has built, but still I feel that the real marvel is the human brain. Will we learn anything from this series, about how it functions and evaluates game positions in a stratetgic games? The classic problem/mystery is how extremely good the human brain is at pruning game-trees. Whole branches are thrown out in split seconds and probably never explored. Currently taking a watt-for-watt comparison there is no question about whose "hardware" is superior -> Lee Sedol's brain. But I guess the DeepMind team and the community will take plenty of lessons from this and in a few years span, Lee Sedol's phone will beat him 100% of the time. At least I wouldn't be willing to bet against it, even though we are hitting the roof in Moore's law.
I would love to compare the energy requirements of the AlphaGo and Mr. Sedol. I imagine there are many orders of magnitude in difference between them. Perhaps the most fair comparison would be between a computer that uses no more energy than a human does. Or, to let the human work with a computer provided they do not use more total energy to play the game.
> Likewise, do you include the energy used to evolve the human brain?
I was thinking of this in a limited, human-promoting sense. We shouldn't lose sight of our own special powers just because a computer the size of a house can outsmart us in a specialized domain :)
A great thinker has passed. One of the great names of 20th century analytical philosophy. They have now all left us, Quine, Rorty, Davidson and now Putnam.
RIP.
I guess they had a similar event on Twin Earth... even though their "water" may be a bit different from our H2O.
yeah. kripke can be convicted of truly awful exegesis of russell, frege, wittgenstein, but his own contributions to philosophy are mammoth. his attack on the identity of necessary truths and a priori knowledge alone is excellent.
I enjoy reading Kripke and agree he's done solid work. But I must admit I don't get the "Great Philosopher" thing. He did great work in mathematics as a teenager then basically just applied that model root and branch to the philosophical problems his teachers fed him. Which was a perfectly legitimate, even clarifying contribution for the time. But it's not clear to me how the result was a huge advance outside the local Carnapian tradition he was entirely inside of. (And as received a nice documentation in Soames's history of analytic philosophy which uses Kripke as the hero.) Then again I read "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as almost provincial!
FWIW, I personally find Putnam, Quine, and even Rorty far more interesting to read both now and from a historical perspective.
i agree on the last point (all 3 more interesting, and i agree with including the 'even'). like i said above though, it's hard to deny that his discussion of contingent a priori as such speaks to kant more directly and strongly than, yeah, "two dogmas of empiricism" (i wasn't impressed either).
to put it another way, i think it would be hard to take many other philosophers as deeply entrenched in a particular set of concerns and assumptions (take, like, derrida or godel) and as effectively press the points of their major work against the work of kant or aristotle or some other towering "we all claim her/him!" figure. "naming and necessity" speaks to kant in terms that need to be answered, which is way more than most publish or perish philosophy professors ever achieve in their lifetime (much less right away, in a lecture presenting a semantics based on modal logic!).
but yeah, the point is well taken. kripke is worth reading once / reading about. putnam is worth reading a lot.
Yea that's a good point about just how much better (and...different) Kripkes work is than that which has been produced by the publish or perish academic system in philosophy. As far as I can tell it's been utterly counter-productive.
In Kripkes favor I would also add that he was a great stylist, with warmth and humor and...flexibility of presentation. And that partly because of this NN and WRPL are perfect introductory philosophy texts for "generally educated" people. If I taught philosophy instead of working in tech, I'd probably help keep Kripkes legacy alive for that reason alone!
While I would agree that his interpretation of Wittgenstein on following a rule and private language, is wrong as such, i.e. as an interpretation, it is definitely very interesting and thought provoking stuff. It is good philosophy and bears good witness to the creative genius of Kripke.
the stuff he calls the "frege-russel theory of names" is even more egregious than his take on wittgenstein.
to be fair, i don't believe his "take on wittgenstein" is exegetical anyway. he's putting forward his own (interesting!) plus/quus argument. kripkenstein is worth reading in its own right; if you care enough to get wittgenstein right in the first place you shouldn't really be looking to kripke's writing to get there.
and of course, "the frege-russell picture of names" is just a straw man to propel his argument forward in N&N. he's really talking to/about searle there, and most people who are going to read N&N know that. but the stuff he says is still wildly inaccurate if you take it at face value.
(not that frege's views on sense and reference are all that clear in the first place, but they weren't the nonsense that frege (or searle!) attribute to him)
if this article makes you think kripke stole the idea of rigid designation, you may as well say he stole it from john stuart mill (or st. augustine, for that matter).
We are indeed witnessing and living a historic moment. It is difficult not to feel awestruck. Likewise, it is difficult not to feel awestruck at how a wet 1.5 kg clump of carbon-based material (e.g. Lee Sedol brain) can achieve this level of mastery of a board game, that it takes such an insane amount of computing power to beat it. So, finally we do have a measure of the computing power required to play Go at the professional level. And it is immense, or to apply a very crude approximation based on Moore's law, it requires about 4096 times more computing power to play Go at the professional level than it does to play chess. Ok, this approx may be a bit crude :)
But maybe this is all just human prejudice... i.e. what this really goes to show is that in the final analysis all board games we humans have inveted and played are "trival", i.e. they are all just like tic-tac-toe just with a varying degree of complexity.
I don't think it is human prejudice, Deepmind can play Go and it cannot drive a car, Lee Sedol's brain can do both. Understanding the nature of cognition will open up new capabilities just as understanding the nature of genetics will open up new capabilities or understanding the nature of the cosmos Etc.
What is most interesting for me is that the nature of solving the problem "how do I win at Go?" is one that has not been, historically, one that computers could solve. Compute the ballistic trajectory of an artillery shell? Easy. Compute a winning strategy on the fly? Impossible. But by creating tools that allow computers to work on those problems we open up the things that can be improved and automated and that has historically improved the experience.
I wholeheartedly agree. I just had a "we feeble humans" moment when I made my comment about our prejudice. And as you point out Sedol's brain can of course do a lot more than just play Go. So, my feeling of feebleness on behalf of humanity was thoroughly unfounded! In fact, it can be argued that our brains are probably too powerful computers for our own good. But who knows, maybe things will conspire and turn us into seals living of some obscure beach on the Galápagos in about a million years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_%28novel%29)
I predict 5-0 for DeepMind. Now, Lee has a broken self-confidence to battle (crucial for a human player), something that will not and can not trouble the DeepMind team.
