Amidst all the fear of AI taking over, and being evil, can we appreciate that what we want to do with a lot of cutting edge AI and neural networking is play games?
Like the line of Alpha Go playing AIs, which play the board game Go! It was once imagined that a robot would never beat a human in chess, there were just too many moves. An AI would never be able to remember all possible âstatesâ of the game, they thought. And yet it happened! AI beat man, and when it did, programmers didn't say "okay we won board games let's do something else!" They said, let's play another game! And that is just so cute.
So, Go playing AIs were developed, and initially, again, people laughed because of the rediculous complexity of Go. For quick reference, I found there to be roughly 3.8 x 10^46 possible boards in chess which is on an 8x8 board. Compare this to go which is a 19x19 board with states of black, white, empty. Therefore, roughly there are 3^361 states of a Go Board. That's impossible to properly imagine so back to the story.
Oh yeah, Alpha Go beat a human. What human? Lee sadol, the world's best Go player at the time. So, thanks to neural networks, and reinforcement learning, an AI was able to beat the best human at Go. Nice. We're done right? Finally humans would do something else with this ability? Nope, we made another AI that also plays Go, but this time we made it teach itself instead of telling it how to play.
That's right, through reinforcement learning, being told either it won or it lost, by initially random moves, and eventually figuring out tactics, it taught itself how to play Go. After I believe 40 hours of playing itself? It beat the previous version. Alpha Go Zero (instructions) beat the previous version Alpha Go, 100-0.
So while I'm sure we're now making an AI that will make another AI that plays Go, let's just enjoy how happy humans are to make bots that play board games.
Also if you're still reading, interesting realization from the outcome of AlphaGo Zero. Initially we had to train AlphaGo on games played by humans. After AlphaGo Zero taught itself, humans are now learning from it!! The strategies used by AlphaGo Zero are unlike anything many master players had ever seen and are currently studying the strategy of this AI that it found out during millions of games against itself!! Just imagine the things AI could figure out for us before we figured them out ourselves, think about how cultural evolution would be sped up, by passing down increasing efficient strategies to generations. But now, think about how scary it is that AIs can realize something before we can, even if we've been doing it for hundreds of years (Go is one of the world's oldest board games and AlphaGo Zero invented its own strategy that was better than anything humans came up with, in under 40 hours)