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Comment by gene-h | Hacker News Reader

AlphaGo has won one game out of three so far, it's not over yet.

It's very likely that AlphaGo will won ALL three invidual games, the pair game and the team game, given all the commentaries that I've been reading in the past few days.

You can bet it will win the pair game, but it will also lose it: an instance of AlphaGo is going to play in both pairs.

The one I'm most interested about is the 5v1 match (which may be what they were referring to?). If AlphaGo wins that one, then it's basically over.

I wouldn't look at it that way. Are five heads playing a single game of Go really better than one? I imagine there would be plenty of disagreements about moves and tactics.

There was a lot of talk in the Go world that the time controls for that game were too short; not enough time for discussion, etc.

It'll likely lose that game as well. Frankly Humans can't be 'boosted' so easily (unless the pros know something I don't).

I've watched the old version beating Lee Sedol. Ke Jie is not a whole lot stronger.

Let it go, man, cause it's gone. A new era has dawned.

From their Elo ratings, Ke Jie is expected to beat Lee Sedol 65% of the time. Last year's AlphaGo lost one of five games against Sedol. So Ke Jie and the old AlphaGo are in the same ballpark of strength. I think it's possible that Ke Jie might win one of the games.

AlphaGo already won the first game, which 5 years ago would have been considered impossible. It is basically over. Google can pour an order of magnitude more computing power at the algorithm to boost its performance if they choose too.

I suppose that invites the next challenge, a machine that can defeat a human with no more power consumption than a meat brain uses.

The question of performance as a function of computing power is an interesting one. Demis Hassabis claims that the returns are diminishing quickly when going above the system they are using. In fact Alpha Go Ke Ji uses 10 times less power than Alpha Go Lee Sedol, though the architecture has changed to using Google's own TPUs, so it's not an easy comparison.

In either case Alpha Go Ke Ji is said to be 3 stones stronger than Alpha Go Lee Sedol which the team claims comes nearly completely from algorithm improvements.

Google has stated previously that the Lee Sedol variant also used TPUs.

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