Alpha Go Zero team; a challenge to finish what you started

That’s a very interesting idea. Let me thinking about it a bit more and see what I can come up with.

ALSO! Any other interesting ideas for wacky LZ-based bots like this?

1 Like

An LZ that tries to maximize winning margin, alias OverplayBot.

2 Likes

I think I can do this quite easily! And it will require minimal coding and only some light tuning if it works. This might be a nice addition for handicap games as well. I’ll give “OverplayBot” a try tomorrow and see what happens!

Anyone have other wacky/awesome ideas for fun LZ modifications? Tell me!

4 Likes

I’ll be running “YourRank” on KGS for the next 6 hours. Feel free to challenge it if you like!

1 Like

I can’t at the moment, although I would dearly love to try! Please let me know the results, however, because if you got it tweaked to win 1/3rd of it’s games, I think you would have create a wonderful resource for players.

Thanks for taking the time and interest in this idea.

Interesting, I had exactly the same idea a week ago. Any chance of making your modified LZ available for download?

1 Like

Could you get YourRank to play on OGS? (and probably on the cloud)

I’d love to try a game or two against it.

1 Like

Just watched end of a game now (against alphagogo (which is not a bot)), but I think it just timed out and lost that way (it was ahead). Also, didn’t open up a new one?

Link to the game?

I just woke up and saw the bot timed out. It was still thinking, with over a million playouts! Some sort of unusual race conditions caused it to get stuck in a loop. But other than that, it played all the other games successfully overnight. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Links to the games?

http://gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=YourRank&oldAccounts=y

The “YourRank” adaptive playing bot is a cool idea, if you have it on OGS I’d love to play it.

I proposed a different twist, a bot that does max punishment and bascially chases the weaker user all across the board, it dynamically detects the strength of the user, the weaker the user is assessed to be, the more bolder and outrageous moves the bot plays, with the idea that for a sufficently weak user, the bot will leave it with almost nothing on the board by the end of the game…

It feels like this would demoralize the weaker player. I’d rather have something that allowed the weaker player to make eyes, in fact force them to by play around space. See some of the DDK games that Dwyrn plays, where he is kind to his opponent and forces them to play good moves by manipulation and peeping.

2 Likes

Your idea of playing forcing moves to indirectly teach is good for learning. the overplay bot is basicallyy a usecase of showcasing in visceral way the power of AI to a beginning casual player who wont be able to appreciate the true strength of a top bot anyway.

1 Like

Is the bot is calculating a 50% win-rate assuming very strong follow-up play from the opponent? If so, won’t its moves still be consistently very strong against many players, since the bot is overestimating the strength of the responses?

1 Like

I’m having trouble with the “I know you want to save human lives and all, but I challenge you to finish what you started: entertaining me!” There’s an insensitivity (human lives are worth less than entertainment) and a hubris (your goal in all of this was to entertain me) implicit that are hard for me to see past.

You say, “Make it the most fun computer program to play for any human player. Then you will have done something useful for all humans.” Like all humans are Go players. Like saving human lives would NOT be useful for all humans.

I’m cringing imagining the AlphaGo folks reading this.

4 Likes

To be fair, the OP may have been slightly tongue in cheek

As for Deepmind, they are by no means above reproach:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/fishcooking/ExSnY8xy7sY

4 Likes

That’s an interesting perspective. I’ll expand a bit further before letting you finish your thoughts.

First, realize that they started their AI experimentation with a game and they will stop when they stop. Theoretically what they learned from the first version that beat Lee Sedol was probably enough. They could have stopped there, but they refined and continued. Why? There was more to explore and discover by optimizing the game client. They create not one more iteration but two more. Each time the AI was well above even expert level players, such a small percentage of people were served by optimizing those last two iterations, the AI was basically only trying to beat itself.

That means they could have jumped away from Go at any point after the first set of games and started looking at other applications. How many street accidents avoided or cancers will be misdiagnosed because the software AI wasn’t ready for weeks sooner is a moral question I don’t think can be answered. However, it was clear that they really wanted to finish with Go. They did not want to leave it hanging before they moved on. This is called follow through and is very important.

Knowing when you are actually doing a follow through correctly and when you are wasting time is also important.

Which brings me to the second point. I don’t think they finished. They created a wonderful AI that can play and defeat any human opponent, but the world doesn’t need that. The world needs help. People need help. And they have not, IMHO, finished what they started until they have created an AI that can help humans. Not beat humans. Humans are already scared enough that AI are going to eventually take over everything. Leaving Alpha Zero as a program that simply beats all humans is not a service to humans, it’s a service to the creators of Alpha Zero who got a lot of publicity from it.

That brings us to the third and final point, which is that to finish with the game of Go, the AI needs to be able to be played as if it were a teacher or friend to humans. Why? Because the ultimate goal of AI is to help human society. Every AI should have that as its starting concept. If it’s not aiding humans, then you have a moral dilemma… an automation that serves itself or worse only its creators.

This is where I’m admittedly asserting that the final step for Alpha Go Zero is to become something any human could use. A tool that benefits society as we slip into the next stage of human evolution and societal development. A role model for how AI is created. AI can be a tool for amazing destruction and perhaps that will happen and create a dystopia. Or it may end up being something amazing and help bring about a human utopia. It’s my strongest desire to see a “humans first” mentality and that this AI be finished to the point where someone who has an interest in Go can play it and it will play with them at their level.

I hope that makes me views more clear.

3 Likes

Gotta know when to tenuki.

3 Likes