Wasn't reading the whole thread, but was it possible for Lee Sedol to play against the final AlphaGo before? Although AlphaGo seems to be a huge achievement I would find the lack of training before a bit unfair as AlphaGo was probably able to play lots of Games from Sedol before.
It's worth mentioning that Lee Sedol mentioned in an interview that even if he loses a single game against AlphaGo, he will have lost the match. He was expecting to win all 5 games.
I was hoping Lee Sedol would be able to at least win one, humans can 'learn fast'. We cant learn 24/7 in parallel like a computer, but we do seem to have quite the talent at learning 'situational' things very quickly, quite likely because our very survival depended on it in the deep distant past. :-)
I don't believe AlphaGo had the time to do any additional training between matches. So effectively Lee has the ability to 'learn his opponent' while AlphaGo cannot until the entire match set is over because of how long it would take do do additional training.
I don't think that AlphaGo was trained more on Lee Sedol's games, than on others' games. The team said that they can't find computer weaknesses until AlphaGo plays against top caliber.
This is different because while AlphaGo did beat Lee Sedol a while ago. Lee was ranked 2nd in the world for Go. Ke Jie, AlphaGo's current opponent, is ranked 1st in the world.
Lee Sedol was also coming directly from playing a tournament against human players. It’s not clear how much he prepared for the Alphago match.
I’d be very curious to see a game between Lee Sedol and Alphago where each was given 4–5 hours of play time, instead of 2 hours each. I suspect Lee Sedol would get more benefit from spending a longer time reading into moves than Alphago could get. Or even a game where the overtime periods were extended to 4–5 minutes.
This last game, Lee spent the whole late middlegame and endgame playing in his 1 minute overtime periods, which doesn’t give much time to carefully compare very complex alternatives.
It was mentioned that AlphaGo was trained on so many games that the games of Lee Sedol that were used for training were not more than a drop in the ocean. This was the answer to the question about whether AlphaGo was trained specifically against Lee Sedol.
AlphaGo has also improved very quickly.
Without doubt, the AlphaGo seen playing against Fan Hui would have lost against Lee Sedol. But in a couple of months its playing level raised significantly.
Lee Sedol said he could beat AlphaGo, based on the Fan Hui games. Ke Jie said he could beat AlphaGo, based on the Lee Sedol games.
Ke Jie belongs to a similar category than Lee Sedol, and we could see how Lee Sedol was completely dominated by AlphaGo, 3-0 so far. It is not unreasonable to say AlphaGo will most likely beat Ke Jie, and even if that doesn't happen the first time, AlphaGo can be improved by adding more infrastructure and training time.
> Either way, it's interesting to note that AlphaGo had literally thousands of games to learn from to find weaknesses in human play, but Lee Sedol seems to have only needed 3 before he was able to find weaknesses in AlphaGo's play.
To be fair we can't know how many games Sodol played in his own head to figure this out.
I don't understand how this is considered fair. AlphaGo has been trained on a database that includes every recorded game Sedol has ever played while Sedol is seeing AlphaGo's play style for the first time. Sedol should have been allowed to play against AlphaGo for a few months before the match so he could study its style.
Perhaps the last big question was whether AlphaGo could play ko positions. AlphaGo played quite well in that ko fight and furthermore, even played away from the ko fight allowing Lee Sedol to play twice in the area.
I definitely did not expect that.
Major credit to Lee Sedol for toughing that out and playing as long as he did. It was dramatic to watch as he played a bunch of his moves with only 1 or 2 seconds left on the clock.
I dont think he wants to play alphago again. Go is a game that relies a lot on confidence: professional players almost never play amateur players casually, for example. Thats because if they lose to an amateur player, it will affect their mindset, their confidence, and they could then perform worse in the real professional tournament.
An argentinian amateur beat 2 strong professionals back then in 2001 in a major professional tournament: it was a huge sensation. Those two professionals basically disappeared from high ranking tournaments forever. It was said that the setback was so severe it affected them permanently(purely hearsay).
Its not good for a professional to play a game he thinks he will lose.
Am I right by asumming, that if they would play another game (AlphaGo black and Lee Sedol white), that Lee Sedol could pressure AlphaGo into makeing the same mistake again?
He'd been playing Go professionally for 24 years. I never said he ragequit. He's too great a man to do something like that. Lee instead apologized for his losses, stating "I misjudged the capabilities of AlphaGo and felt powerless" while emphasizing that the defeat was his own and "not a defeat of mankind". That's a big burden to bear. His professional ratings then took a dive for a few years https://www.goratings.org/en/history/ before he announced his retirement. To this day he remains the only human being who's ever won a single game against AlphaGo.
Based on all the commentaries, it seems that Lee Sedol was really not ahead during the game at any point during the game... and I think everybody has their answer regarding whether AlphaGo can perform in a Ko fight. That's a yes.
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