“The king is so weak! He moves so slow!
The queen is the strongest to show!
Now dont try to take a wild guess!
It’s not life! Just a game of chess!”
The chess team from India has again made the country proud!
The chess revolution which started with Viswanathan “Vishy” Anand has now become a tsunami!
Chess is one of the most complex games!
And defeating a human in Chess was one of the pinnacles of success in the world of AI!
After just three pairs of moves in chess there are about 121 million possible configurations of the board!
But…(you knew there was a but coming didn’t you!?); there is a game in which after three moves, there are on the order of 200 quadrillion possible configurations!
And yeah; One AI cracked that one too!
read on!
This game is called Go! It starts simple enough but then the complexity begins!
Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese scholars in antiquity. The earliest written reference to the game is generally recognized as the historical annals Zuo Zhuan ( c. 4th century BCE).
Now, Mathematicians rate the complexity of games by the size of the tree of lines that can be played from the initial position. On this basis, go is the hardest followed by shogi, xiangqi, then chess, and finally checkers.
Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is extremely complex.
You aim to surround your opponent’s stones with your own, and once they’re surrounded, you take them off the board.
That’s pretty much it.
It’s often said that there are more potential configurations of a Go board than there are atoms in the known universe; one million trillion trillion trillion trillion more configurations!
Still interested in playing!?
When AI was developing it was often said that they could never beat a human in Chess! Then On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in the first game of a six-game match—the first time a computer had ever beat a human in a formal chess game!
It was then many mentioned that Chess is not even the most complex games! The real test is for an AI to beat a human in Go!
This is because with so many possibilities, traditional approaches stood no chance.
When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess, it used the so-called brute-force technique, where an algorithm aims to systematically crunch through as many possible moves as it can!
Basically that means that it is analysing and trying all the configurations possible! This of course is hopeless in a game with as many branching outcomes as Go!
Come AlphaGo!
This is the story of that AI as mentioned in the novel the Coming wave by Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman.
Urged by Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, AlphaGo initially learned by watching 150,000 games played by human experts!
The key next step was creating lots of copies of AlphaGo and getting it to play against itself over and over. This meant the algorithm was able to simulate millions of new games, trying out combinations of moves that had
never been played before, and therefore efficiently explore a huge range of possibilities, learning new strategies in the process!
Then the D day came in March 2016 in South Korea!
Al-phaGo was pitted against Lee Sedol, a virtuoso world champion. It was far from clear who would win. Most commentators backed Sedol going into round one. But AlphaGo won the first game! This was of course a shock for the audience and a delight for the AlphaGo team!
But the real shocker was in the second game!
In this came move number 37, a move now famous in the annals of both Al and Go!
It apparently made no sense at first!
Everyone thought that AlphaGo had apparently lost it!
It was blindly following a losing strategy no professional player would ever pursue! The live match commentators, both professionals of the highest ranking, said it was a “very strange move” and thought it was
“a mistake.”
It was so unusual that Sedol took fifteen minutes to respond and even got up from the board to take a walk outside.
As everyone watched the tension could cut a bone!
Then came the big reveal!
As the endgame approached, that “mistaken” move proved pivotal. AlphaGo won again!
Go strategy was being rewritten before everyone’s eyes.
The Al had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years. In just a few months, the team could train algorithms to discover new knowledge and find new, seemingly superhuman insights!
AlphaGo went on to beat Sedol 4-1. It was only the beginning. Later versions of the software like AlphaZero dispensed with any prior human knowledge! Which meant that the old ‘human’ techniques of winning the game was ‘outdated’!
The system simply trained on its own, playing itself millions of times over, learning from scratch to reach a level of performance that trounced the original AlphaGo without any of the received wisdom or input of human players!
In other words, with just a day’s training, Alp-haZero was capable of learning more about the game than the entirety of human experience could teach it!
AlphaGo’s triumph heralded a new age of Al! Of course one of the greatest triumph of the past which heralded a resurgence of Indian cricket was the 1983 world cup! One of the stars of that was birthday celebrity Bishan Singh Bedi!
Now play some chess or Go to exercise your brain and sleep!
Shubh ratri!
ramadocblog 