Google’s AlphaGo AI defeats team of five leading Go players

[carbocation]

Is playing go as a team something that people do? It seems unintuitive. I'd expect a team of 5 experts to play worse than one expert.

[dengnan]

It is common. The Chinese commentator Gu Li mentioned pair game and team game. But I cannot find an English page about it. Here is a Chinese Wikipedia page. https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/团队围棋

FWIW, the five people team played with Ke Joe before the game and won (again, according to Gu Li.)

[jvolkman]

If you consider that the team is just a group of experts discussing an ongoing game and variations that may be better/worse, it seems pretty common. I'd imagine that multiple experts could perform better given sufficient time. With only a few hours, most of the time seems like it'd be lost in inefficient human IPC.

[Jach]

Stealing a comment from https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/6deoqk/team_alphago_...

> Gu Li was talking about previous Team matches, and how once a team of Shi Yue, Zhou Ruiyang and Chen yaoye kept on arguing about what to do, and couldn't reach an agreement...

> Meanwhile, the other team had Kang Dongyun, Park Junghwan and Choi Cheolhan. Choi Cheolhan occasionally looked at the variations to make sure there are no silly mistakes, Kang Dongyun's job was to buy lunch for everyone, and Park Junghwan played the game.

> The Korean team ended up winning.

[Ajedi32]

Yeah, that was a question I had while watching the stream too. Is a team of Go experts working together typically considered stronger than a single, highly skilled player playing alone?

Also worth noting that due to the time constraints of this particular match, the human players didn't really have a lot of time to discuss and debate every move they chose, which could have had a negative impact on the potential advantages of working as a team.

[mholmes680]

My thoughts were on this line also... the same reason the crowd was shocked when Lee Sedol made an unexpected move in game 4. [0]

Is there any research done to prove/disprove that groupthink is inherently worse compared to a single genius? (less risky behavior, so less risk/less reward??) Are we training AIs that will be safe, not bold independent thinkers?

0: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-re...

[conanbatt]

Yes and no.

I always said in Pair Go , that 1 bad idea is better than 2 good ones.

But provided discussion, you can be a lot more thorough in consensus. Professional analyze and study games in groups, and some thing come out of that.

I'd say overall the result is a game with no blunders , but no edge. Since you are sharing the blame of a loss, you are not as focused on winning as you are on not losing.

[unspecified]

Michael Redmond and Andrew Jackson talked briefly about historical team games while the game was getting underway:

https://youtu.be/V-_Cu6Hwp5U?t=4h26m30s

There are other points in the commentary where they discuss some of the team's strategy, as well as their time management.

[devy]

Pair Go matches are trendy these days from what I read. It's a good training process for stronger player teaching the relatively weaker player in the pair in real matches.

Team Go playing is probably a different story I agree.

[echevil]

At this point no one expect alphago would lose. So just have fun

[mackncheesiest]

To be fair, AlphaGo probably utilizes ensembles of networks in some form anyway. So, in a way, it's kind of been playing as a team this whole time :)

[Florin_Andrei]

Well, what do you think your brain is? :)

[chr15]

This is pretty amazing. It shows there is a level of intelligence that exists above what these 5 can achieve collectively. Scientists have effectively created life when something can make decisions for itself and outsmart humans.

Human intelligence has reached a ceiling and machines will get smarter and smarter. In hundreds or thousands of years, AI will be smart enough to control us. This Go game will manifest itself into reality - it will be a strategic game of humans vs machines.

[sprafa]

I'd say human intelligence hasn't reached a ceiling, only that it doesn't grow as quickly as machine intelligence can.

[arcanus]

Algorithms are the new 10x developer.

I'm actually half serious: one can see how something that is slightly better can have a massive multiplier, e.g. a team of inferior intelligences cannot 'scale' to beat a single superior intelligence in some regimes.

This does not apply to all fields, of course. But in many regions of abstraction it may.

[nightski]

With the caveat that it is a single, specific task. The team here of 5 is probably capable of more than playing Go :) That's not all bad, there are advantages to having something really good at one objective. But I wonder if there is a fundamental trade off.

[tokai]

Have they done a human and AlphaGo vs AlphaGo yet? As I understand it centaur teams of human and computer in chess are superior to computers or humans playing alone. It would be interesting to see if this holds with go as well.

[foobar__]

Where did you find this information for chess? It sounds unintuitive that a superior player would benefit from a weak player's help.

[EternalData]

I thought this was supposed to be a few years away -- i.e beating Lee Sidol was impressive, but Lee wasn't nearly the top player in the world?

Wow, this must be what it feels like to be living on a parabolic curve...

[daveguy]

Lee Sedol was near the top (#7). He wasn't the very top, that was Ke Jie. And now Ke Jie has been beaten 2/3, maybe 3/3 times.

Sedol was beaten soundly -- 4/5 games. So this is an improvement, but not an exponential one.

Go is definitely conquered like chess was 1-2 decades ago.

https://www.goratings.org/en/

[waqf]

AlphaGo had a fundamentally new architecture (nobody had successfully applied convolutional neural networks to Go before, although of course the headline underestimates the expertise and experimentation that's needed to get the details right).

So it's not surprising that at the first public announcement they hadn't yet pushed the technology as far as it would go.

[farhanhubble]

An interesting thing to observe in the long run would be if humans playing against AI are able to improve their moves and beat the AI.

[31reasons]

This is going to make all the Go players out of job pretty soon. :)

[cyborgx7]

Cars have been faster than people for ages, but marathons and sprints are still popular sports.

[pdpi]

No more than Deep Blue put pro chess players out of a job.

[jayramone]

Machine vs human is never fair. That is like Usain Bolt vs a modern car.