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RE: AlphaGo Zero Mastered Chess in Just Four Hours of Self-study
Thanks for the detailed reply. My suggestion was that, perhaps, transfer learning comes into play. Would there, in any way, be benefit from applying learning of Go to Chess? If not, then in some ways to me it calls into question the value of a general artificial intelligence for specific use cases, since prior knowledge could actually hamper performance. For example, if an AlphaGo Zero that mastered Go was subsequently worse at chess than an AlphaGo Zero that didn't master Go, then it might suggest that general intelligence is a hindrance. A great related essay, if you haven't read it yet, is this recent one by François Chollet: "The impossibility of intelligence explosion."
Thanks for your thoughtful comment! I know a couple of Go players who were Chess players first. Both were fast learners in the beginning. But their advantage seemed to be limited to the beginning of their learning curve. What is common for at least human players in Go and Chess is the requirement to imagine potential sequences and hold them in one's mind when doing a mental search for the next move. I think that skill helped both of the players I knew at first.
My definition of intelligence is the capacity to learn and adapt to novel situations. The more general intelligence one possesses the faster one can acquire any new skills. Thus, in my view, it is impossible for general intelligence to be a hindrance. Too much prior knowledge can be a hindrance in learning another skill because of overapplying the knowledge at first. But that issue is not a weakness of general intelligence.
One thing to note about AlphaGo and its successors is that despite achieving superhuman levels of skill in an extremely short period of time, their efficiency in terms of energy consumption at both learning and applying their skill is very low compared to a talented human. Their training entails millions games of self-play whereas a talented player such as Ke Jie (the best human player at this time) has been able to learn the game by playing and analyzing only some tens of thousands of games. Humans are capable of learning at a much higher level of abstraction, achieving an energy efficiency advantage of several orders of magnitude. These AI architectures are, in fact, of quite low intelligence in that sense. In order for AI systems to gain superhuman general intelligence, much better architectures are needed.
Great points. I agree that, all else being equal, there’s an advantage to general intellectual capabilities, such as the ability to recognize patterns. But I’m not convinced that a general artificial intelligence competing against a narrow artificial intelligence optimized to a single purpose would always win going head-to-head on the same problem. The article I linked to makes some excellent points about how intelligence is situational and depends on the context. It also points out that people with exceptional IQs (assuming this actually measures intelligence) can actually be at a disadvantage, and don’t outperform, as a whole, people with lower IQs in the game of life. Perhaps a modular design, where a general intelligence can choose to turn on or off specific modules optimized to a purpose, combines the best of both worlds. And in fact, the brain seems to contain many such specialized modules.
I read the article. I agree that using a hypothetical general AI instead of a narrow AI to solve a problem wouldn't always be the best choice. And yes, the brain really has different brain areas specialized in different particular tasks.
I'd say that recent advances in deep convoluted neural networks have allowed for the development of astonishingly capable narrow AI systems. Developing artificial minds capable of independent existence and goal setting seems very far off at this stage, however.
Agreed. Good chat. So rare to have productive, respectful dialogue in social media. I wonder if this is sustainable here in the long-term. I hope so.
On Steem, thoughtful conversations have an advantage of monetary worth on top of sentimental and utilitarian worth. I would say that since the platform rewards us to have such interactions we will eventually get conditioned to have more of them.
I certainly hope so. I think if you look at the hierarchy of conversations in social media, quality goes from Twitter (anonymity allows abuse), to Facebook (social repercussions keep people in line, but conversation is light), to LinkedIn (indirect financial reward for seeming intelligent). Perhaps Steem is the next level: direct financial reward for valuable contributions.