Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

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And, yes, computers can easily smoke all players.

FTFY

In chess the top engines are rated hundreds of ELO points above Magnus Carlsen (top human). No top ranked human vs computer match has been publicised in over 5 years because humans are thoroughly trounced. There are cyborg matches which are interesting. Human + Computer vs Human + Computer because gameplay techniques are considered different. Humans still depend more on higher level goal strategy and less on ruthless positional efficiency (which is probably why they get beat midgame).

What is mind boggling is that 6 months ago no go engine was scratching the surface of professional level go. It took the engines getting a 4-5 stone handicap to be competitive at the lowest level of professional levels.

It looks like this one algorithm has blown through the professional ranks in about 3 months. And a 5-0 victory here would be like 2006 vs 1996 (or even 1993) chess in 3 months.

I guess it's because Go isn't that well known in the West but I find it a bit surprising (though not really) that this isn't getting more press. When Kasparov lost it was news but not really surprising. If it wasn't Kasparov that a computer beat, it would have been the next champion. The writing was on the wall for a long time. It was just a question of when exactly.

As for Go, I guess I would never had made a long bet against computers. But as recently as just over a decade ago, computers lost to merely competent players and people working on Go programs were pretty much saying that they didn't even know what the path forward looked like. Things improved a lot with Monte Carlo but even that stalled out. Admittedly, I don't follow this area closely, but these wins pretty much came out of nowhere.

It's probably due to the relatively recent fact that neural networks stopped being "a 1990s fad" and became a thing again.

Go may not be well known in the west, but it was extremely well known in AI circles. Even before DeepBlue, Go was considered the holy grail of competitive game AI.

Oh, I'm well-aware of that and obviously this is big news on sites like this one. I was mostly remarking that this is pretty low on general news radar screens.

I see. What one means by "computer" is always a moving target. Deep Blue was a specially prepared supercomputer from 20 years ago. Apparently, today's top chess software running on a half-decent off-the-shelf machine could crush Deep Blue.

A smartphone can crush any human alive at chess.

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