[boredguy8]

I like how Ken Jennings dealt with the 'Go complexity' analogy:

"Go is famously a more complex game than chess, with its larger board, longer games, and many more pieces. Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team likes to say that there are more possible Go boards than atoms in the known universe, but that vastly understates the computational problem. There are about 10^170 board positions in Go, and only 10^80 atoms in the universe. That means that if there were as many parallel universes as there are atoms in our universe (!), then the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be close to the possibilities on a single Go board."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/03/...

[sametmax]

Comparing combinations with numbers of items is unfair.

In Go, the number of items is the number of pieces, and it's very small.

In the universe, the number of combinations of positions of all the atoms is, well, wonderful.

[harryjo]

I don't think anyone believes that Go is somehow more complex than the universe it is a subset of. The point is that enumerating all cases of Go is impossible and always will be, so more sophisticated analysis is required.

[tomrod]

I _love_ the way you stated this. Thank you!

[deepnet]

Compared with a googol our Universe has negligible atoms , 10^100 - 10^80 = ~10^100

Compared with a googolplex (10^(10^100)) the entire Evrettian metaverse is negligible as (10^(10^100) - 10^80^2 * (average quarks in atom) * leptons(10^200) * dark multiplier(10^2) = ~1 googolplex

Has anyone ever used a googolplex for anything ?

[For ~ read approximately]

[Retric]

Don't conflate the "Observable Universe" with the actual Universe. We flat out don't know how big the actual Universe is. So, it could be 10^80, 10^800, or even A(10, 80)* Atoms.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ackermann_function

[dsfuoi]

It could be infinite.

[randommodnar]

While this comparison highlights that yes, there are very many possible Go games, it's really apples to oranges.

The real comparison would be the number of pieces on a Go board (19x19 = 361) compared to the number of atoms in the universe. And then to compare the number of possible board positions in Go, with the number of possible atom positions in the universe, and in this case I think the universe wins.....

[dack]

especially considering all go boards exist _within_ the universe!

[IsaacL]

Go is very complex, and the fact that DeepMind could tackle this complexity is a huge technical achievement. No minimax-based AI could have tackled such a large state space.

However, other problems have even larger state spaces. Imagine writing an AI which read project Euler problem descriptions (in English) and output working code (in some given programming language). Keep outputs limited to 100-line scripts, max 80 characters per line.

There's roughly 100 usable characters in ASCII, so the possible space of 100-line programs is roughly:

(10^2)^(80 * 100) = 10^16000.

You could simplify this by having the AI work with predefined tokens rather than individual characters, but it's still a vast amount of combinations. Then consider 1000-line or 10000-line programs, and you see how high a mountain AI still has to climb. Humans are able to "compress" this state space via conceptual reasoning, which is much more complex than the "pattern recognition" many deep learning researchers are chasing.

(See "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" for more on how humans think in concepts - I'm planning to write more at some point on how this book shows where the practical limits of AI lie).

[tossaway1]

> the total number of atoms in all those universes combined would be close

Close?? Wouldn't it still be roughly 10 billion times smaller...?

[vidarh]

When you're dealing with numbers on the order of 10^80 to 10^170, I think you're entitled to calling that "close".