The correct number of legal Go positions is over twice as much, or to be exact [1]:
208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935
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.
For reference, the estimated number of individual atoms in the universe is thought to be between mere 10^80 and 10^83.
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?
Yes, but what are the estimated number of states of all these atoms?
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.
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.
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.
Truly a must watch! (just look at the video comments to be convinced)
What stuck with me is Lee Sedol's strong emotional reaction, leading him to leave professional Go playing.
It's understandable he didn't expect AlphaGo to be that strong. Or that (for him) losing to a machine took the 'soul' out of the game.
But come on... I've been cornered by Pac-Man ghosts many times. That doesn't make Pac-Man less fun to play.
Nor does losing to the crude 'AI' steering those ghosts. Instead, you play, aim for a high score, see how long you can survive, how many levels you can complete, or how many fruits & ghosts you can eat in a game.
And (if you care) compare how those 'metrics' stack up against other players.
If a machine with superhuman Go-playing ability isn't fun or challenging, then stick to human opponents.
Of course it's his views and choices, and I respect that. But other than providing extremely challenging opponent, I don't see how human-beating machine would take the fun out of a game. Rather the opposite: new tactics, new insights, a raised upper bound for a Go player's strength (human or otherwise), etc.
Open up how you frame personality types and life experiences, and you can think of possibilities beyond "I don't see how".
"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.
I thought it would be an easy victory
I ... ended up only winning one out of our five games
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.