Hacker News Reader

Comment by gliptic | Hacker News Reader

But that isn't true. AlphaGo Zero seemed to be considerably stronger against humans than AlphaGo Lee. Lee managed to win one game against AlphaGo Lee, but AlphaGo Zero won 60 games in a row against top players, as well as all games against Ke Jie.

View on HN

I think you're wrong. The version that defeated Ke Jie and 60 masters online was AlphaGo Master, which afaik did train on human games.

You're right, I misremembered how Master was trained because they already had developed Zero by then. I still don't think there's any reason to believe Zero would do worse against humans than the Lee version. Zero was much stronger than Master, which was initially trained on human games. If the consequent self-play learning caused any non-transitive relation to humans, it sure wasn't evident when Master played against humans. So why would it show up in the learning of Zero given how much stronger it is than Master. You would have a better case if there was a reason to believe humans played anywhere near optimally.

Because Zero was not trained on human games and Master was? Do we have any model which was trained only from self-play that can beat humans? I don't think so.

You seriously don't think Zero can beat humans? 6 stone advantage over AG Lee that was trained on human games? If AG Lee behaves like a superstrong human, then Zero handily beating AG Lee is clear evidence that Zero would beat humans. I don't understand how your intransitivity is supposed to work when DeepMind didn't find any when training in different ways. Are they supposed to run a tournament just to show that a massive improvement that crushes all previous versions can still beat puny humans?

Your intuition is strongly assuming transitivity: "A beats B handily and B beats C handily, therefore this is clear evidence that A beats C handily". I already gave an example where this is not true, and I don't know why you're still doubling down on the same wrong intuition.

> DeepMind didn't find any when training in different ways

Intransitivity may not occur within AG versions but could occur when compared to humans. You need very different types of strategies for intransitivity to occur.

> Are they supposed to run a tournament just to show that a massive improvement that crushes all previous versions can still beat puny humans?

I think so, yes. We do this with Chess. Why should Go be different?

Deepmind is aware of this problem. See gwern's links if you are interested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com