[FRIAM] Google self-evolving AlphaZero artificial intelligence program mastered chess from scratch in 4 hours: Rich Murray 2017.12.10

[Steven A Smith]

Marcus wrote:
>
> Is a strategy anything more than a coarse-grained tactic?   And is
> intuition anything more than an associative memory that connects
> coarse- and fine- grained information?
>
Is it any more?  Or any less?

Learning is an iterated game that operates at many scales and on many
dimensions...

<TL;Don'tRead>

    The Biological Evolution record shows myriad explosions in quantity
    and diversity  that resulted from a (small? but) significant
    innovation (e.g. multicellular organisms, Eukaryotes,
    photosynthesis, oxygen metabolisms, vertebrae,  warm blooded
    metabolism, live birth, etc).   Punctuated equilibrium?

    There seem to be similar inflection points in the "learning" implied
    in human social/technological/economic evolution and we may be in on
    the shoulder of "yet another" which gestures in the direction of the
    von Nuemann/Vinge/Kurzweillian "technological singularity".

    I'm not much of a chess expert, myself, playing only *barely*
    competitively in my late teens (as Spassky and Fischer were dukingit
    out), and revisiting it in the pre-ALife era of "evolution, games,
    and learning" in the late 80s, along with GO.  Chess itself, as a
    "playing field" for learning strategy is a microcosm to observe the
    general idea of "learning".   The history of chess is fascinating. 
    In the current context, it is fascinating that out of about 1500
    years of existence (in proto-forms), for a little over 500 of it,
    the rules have settled on what we use today, but the tactics and
    strategies developed *on top* of those has continued to  both
    *evolve* and *reflect* society at large.  Most notably, perhaps, the
    "Romantic Period" where one of the dominant ideas was that personal
    genius *and* style mattered more than theory or logic or even board
    positions.   This somewhat reflected the military and political
    style of that period.  During the "age of Enlightenment" it also had
    a moral embedding...  The "modern" era emerged with the industrial
    revolution and more importantly perhaps, the mechanization of war
    where chess strategy, now somewhat more "scientific" began to
    eventually give rise to "hypermodernism" which focus more on
    controlling the center of the board from afar (a parallel to
    mechanized warfare where power could be projected over a great
    distance in a short amount of time).   Algorithmic play and
    mathematical analysis has been considered since the late Romanitc
    period but didn't come into it's own  until the modern digital
    computer, with Claude Shannon taking an early swipe at the problem
    as early as 1950!   The fact that it took more than 50 years to get
    to Deep Blue's thin victory over Kasparov is more a testimony to how
    subtle and hard Chess is than how intelligent humans are, etc.

    "Deep Learning" itself seems like nothing more (and nothing less)
    than the latest innovation in machine learning (game theory, neural
    nets, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, learning classifiers,
    etc.) which *could* very well portend the breakaway point of the
    AI-driven technological singularity.  I'm not THAT up on "Deep
    Learning" but things like Generative Antagonistic Networks (and
    other unsupervised machine learning) seem to have the key quality of
    not needing supervision by humans to learn...  there may be one more
    level of indirection to be had before things go ape-shit
    (exponentially speaking)...  

     I personally don't imagine that a *single* AI will be the source of
    this, but rather a Cambrian-explosion-like plethora of AI's, though
    they may be so pervasive and promiscuous as to cross-fertilize so
    thoroughly that they will be a single "organism" for all practical
    purposes. 

</TL;DR>

- Steve
>
>  
>
> *From:*Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *John
> Kennison
> *Sent:* Monday, December 11, 2017 7:17 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Google self-evolving AlphaZero artificial
> intelligence program mastered chess from scratch in 4 hours: Rich
> Murray 2017.12.10
>
>  
>
> I once thought I had a sure-fire way to make games between humans and
> computers fairer. Start with a large set of chess-like games that use
> different boards, different pieces, different rules. Enumerate the
> games so that each one corresponds to a n-digit binary numeral (for
> large n). Then make a "super game" in which the players start by
> creating a n digit binary numeral by taking turns in which they can
> specify one of the n binary digits. The super game would continue by
> playing the chess-like game that corresponds to the created number. 
>
>  
>
> In a super game between a human and a computer, the computer would not
> have access to all the insights into the nature of chess that humans
> have established over hundreds of years of playing chess and which
> chess playing computers use to defeat humans.  Of course, the human
> player would also be deprived of all the years of research into chess,
> but humans can use their marvelous intuition to figure out a
> reasonable set of strategies even for a game they haven't studied
> before. The computer, without a reasonable set of strategies, would (I
> assumed) find little benefit from  its massive computing power. 
>
>  
>
> The new AlphaZero game playing computer refutes my idea.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:*Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of Rich Murray
> <rmforall at gmail.com <mailto:rmforall at gmail.com>>
> *Sent:* Monday, December 11, 2017 12:16:26 AM
> *To:* Rich Murray
> *Subject:* [FRIAM] Google self-evolving AlphaZero artificial
> intelligence program mastered chess from scratch in 4 hours: Rich
> Murray 2017.12.10
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
> https://futurism.com/4-hours-googles-ai-mastered-chess-knowledge-history/
>
>  
>
> Chess isn’t an easy game, by human standards. But for an artificial
> intelligence powered by a formidable, almost alien mindset, the
> trivial diversion can be mastered in a few spare hours.
>
>  
>
> In a new paper, Google researchers detail how their latest AI
> evolution, AlphaZero, developed “superhuman performance” in chess,
> taking just four hours to learn the rules before obliterating the
> world champion chess program, Stockfish.
>
>  
>
> In other words, all of humanity’s chess knowledge – and beyond – was
> absorbed and surpassed by an AI in about as long as it takes to drive
> from New York City to Washington, DC.
>
>  
>
> After being programmed with only the rules of chess (no strategies),
> in just four hours AlphaZero had mastered the game to the extent it
> was able to best the highest-rated chess-playing program Stockfish.
>
>  
>
> In a series of 100 games against Stockfish, AlphaZero won 25 games
> while playing as white (with first mover advantage), and picked up
> three games playing as black. 
>
> The rest of the contests were draws, with Stockfish recording no wins
> and AlphaZero no losses.
>
>  
>
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