Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is the same argument against basic and theoretical research. Why spend your time studying obscure insects and animals when you could be doing something worth while? Why study pure math or chase strange theorems that often have no application to anything relevant what so ever?

Because these endeavors all lead to novel tools and learnings that are at times applicable in surprising ways to help solve "whatever important problem."

For example, number theory, on its face, seems completely useless, and since 1800 BCE, years were "wasted" by scholars toying with useless factoring problems...

...until we got RSA cryptography in the 1970s.

If I had lived in the year 1900, I could have never imagined number theory having such immensely important applications, but in 2020, I sure as hell believe AlphaGo and these game solvers have relevance because it's already bearing fruit.

AlphaGo, for one, inspired many application papers. My favorite example though is of a neural net trained to solve CSPs through sudoko which was applied to the inverse protein folding problem! https://ostrokach.gitlab.io/project/proteinsolver/

I'm not sure an analogy between maths or AlphaGo and board games is reasonable, at least for the kind of board games OP was, I think, considering. OP was mentioning "mental energy", meaning they were thinking about playing the game.

Chess, Go, etc. are constrained environments. Playing these games makes you better at them. Maybe you'll find a new opening, a new sequence, etc., but I don't think you'll ever be able to apply it to another field.

Implementing AlphaGo is no longer playing the game, it's analyzing a computer science problem and finding a solution. Number theory was still about understanding some objects that seemed natural and given, rather than arbitrary ones with artificial constraints, like these games are.

The OP posted a chess like variant, so I used that as my baseline. Sure mental energy is wasted playing games, but a lot of modern mathematics has arisen from the study of games... Consider:

- Game Theory

- Was the "Seven Bridges of Königsberg" not a fun puzzle of sorts?

- Was probability and statistics not founded on trying to hack gambling?

- Did knot theory start out with advanced applications in mind or people deep dive into making knots for religious reasons?

- How are Fermat's last theorem, the Collatz Conjecture, Goldbachs conjecture, or the twin primes conjecture not unnatural, constrained environments?

I'd argue DeepBlue and AlphaGo and Watson /are/ playing the game, just in a far more sophisticated manner, and our collective learnings as humans provide the foundation for academic endeavors. If you remember, the first variant of AlphaGo studied games played by expert humans.

Also, playing, understanding, and thinking about these games has been a boon to the AI community for decades. McCarthy has an article on the subject called "Chess as the Drosophila of AI".

My point is that these things start off as games and puzzle divorced from a problem, as a pure pursuit of leisure or curiosity, and over time, perhaps millennia, these mental explorations bear fruit in the most surprising ways.

I still think you missed the question.

Game Theory, Seven Bridges of Königsberg, etc. were not raised by the game players, but mathematicians.

And the original question is not arguing against the "usefulness" of these games themselves either; it's about the practice/endeavor of merely playing these games.

>DeepBlue and AlphaGo and Watson /are/ playing the game

DeepBlue and AlphaGo are playing the games. But they don't "think" or, in the OP's words, "waste their mental energy", since they are not even human beings.

The designers of these AIs are not playing the games, though. That's what the question is about.

>Also, playing, understanding, and thinking about these games

To me, thinking about these games' mechanisms and/or how to optimizing them is totally different from the mental energy used in playing it.

Again, I'm not disagreeing or agreeing with this sentiment (actually I strongly disagree), just trying to explain what the OG questions is in my understanding.

This falls into the thinking “pure math is ok, since it will often become practical on a long enough time horizon”. Why not “pure math is ok because that’s what people want to do”?

Whether you can get funded for your explorations is a separate question, but no justification is needed for them.

My point is not that "pure math is ok" since it will eventually become practical. My point is that its not a vacuous waste of time as the OP suggests. Exploring a math problem for fun is not like sitting on your couch and twiddling your thumbs.

Yes, sitting on a couch arguably has value to someone as leisure, but its pretty clear that studying puzzles and exploring the possibilities of rigorous logical thought also happens to be valuable.

This is why we pay and award people to think about these problems rather than sit on couches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com