In March AlphaGo, the new neural-net based AI from Google Deepmind which has already beaten Fan Hui 2p 5-0, will play Lee Sedol 9p, who probably has the best claim to be the top pro in the world over the last decade. We still don't know details (should be 5 games) like time limits, but if we assume at least the 1 hour main time from the Fan Hui match (I hope at least 3 hours) who do you think will win?

https://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/ ... me-go.html

(discussion thread about AlphaGo here: viewtopic.php?f=18&p=198226#p198226)

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why can't we have a discussion without hiding them?

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I mentioned in the other thread that goratings.org thinks Fan Hui would have a 3% chance to win against Lee Sedol.

AlphaGo seems better than Fan Hui, but we don't know by how much. Let's be conservative and say it has a 5% chance of beating Lee Sedol.

The odds that Lee wins:
5/5: 77%
4/5: 20%
3/5: 2%
less: <1%

Goratings only has 11 games from Fan Hui (2 wins 9 losses) and the last game was December 2014. The rating algorithm probably has considerable uncertainty about his true rating. Also the 5-0 isn't a particularly large sample size either. It's still possible the odds for AlphaGo could be <1%. And of course we could also argue the program will continue to improve and the odds are much higher than 5%.

At his best, Lee will crush any computer. So I am tempted to predict 5-0 in his favor.

But I'll give the computer one win when Lee makes a mistake.

My vote is Lee wins 4-1.

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I would redo your math. How much stronger than Fan Hui is AlphaGo likely to be? Asked another way, what would it's likelihood to win a single game be, if it's odds of wInning five in a row are 50%? Say, x^5=.5

I think that comes out to an 87% likelihood.

Now for you rating experts, what does that mean in elo terms versus Fan Hui? And then for its chances against Lee Sedol?

That's if the odds of a sweep were, indeed, 50-50. It could be far stronger, increasing the odds of the same result. So this is more of a floor for estimating AlphaGo's strength.

(Sorry, I'm literally on a desert island, and this is all I had time for.)

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This question might be partially answered in the paper itself.

According to this interesting figure:


The distributed version of AlphaGo is ~250 rating points above Fan Hui. If my calculations are right, this would imply a 96.3% probability of winning a single game and an 82.6% probability of winning 5 games in a row.

(It also shows that pro-level strength in our home computers might be closer than we think)

Various pros favor Lee Sedol at the moment, so they clearly see significant difference between his level and what AlphaGo showed in its match against Fan Hui. The only unknown quantity is AlphaGo's improvement between October and March. It brings us to question of how long DeepMind team waited and trained AlphaGo before offering Fan to play against it.
If they had no time limit at all, it's likely that current version of the program learned about as much as it can (because obviously these guys want their creation to be at its best in any public games). Of course, there will be some improvements, but they'll probably be quite small - unless the team had a sudden breakthrough.
If they had a time limit from Google (who, in example, may have wanted their Go AI to hit the news before the one made by Facebook did), then it's entirely possible for March AlphaGo to be on a completely different level from October version.
I don't know enough about people and companies involved to make a good guess which scenario is more likely, so it seems wiser not to make any guess at all. Personally, I'd prefer slow progress, so I can see more interesting games between top pros and computers before the latter completely overcome the former.

There's a lot of folks assuming the AG will get much better w/ 6 months of extra work. The history of go AI has been large jumps interspersed with long plateaus of nominal improvement. Why do people assume this is different and that 6 months will be 6 months of linear progress?

If anything, look at how quickly the scaling improvements seem to level out. 280 GPUS is only slightly stronger than 112.

Fan Hui's rating on goratings is 2900. Lee Sedol is 600 points higher, 3500! By their own chart AG distributed is ~3100 -- and the paper mentions they anchor their Elo scale to Fan Hui.

Lastly, i have to observe that all computer programs have bugs. If AG has no bugs, the Google press release should've been about how Deepmind figured out how to write bug-free software instead

I don't think it will get *much* better (well okay, maybe the way I phrased it in my prediction post earlier says otherwise...), but that it only needs just the slightest boost to get there. However, I do really think some people are blowing up the difference between Fan Hui's level and Lee Sedol's level, one factor being the large ELO point difference on goratings.org which I don't consider to be such a reliable measure of skill difference (Andy Liu 300 points higher than Fan Hui, and higher than Yoda Norimoto, Nie Weiping, and Zhou Zunxun? Yuki Satoshi higher than Lee Changho, Cho U, Chang Hao, and Kong Jie?).

Cho U is in much worse form lately. GoRatings and mamumamu0413 agree. Yuki Satoshi probably is stronger (and go searching for John F's posts on Yuki).

Andy Liu benefits from having four recent wins and only five games, which is pretty awesome, but his rating is wrong for predictable reasons that don't discredit the whole system.

Now, you might wonder whether Fan has many games? He doesn't, but you could take a basket approach. Look at all the Western players: Andy Liu, Dinerstein, Gansheng Shi, Lisy, Surma, Shikshin, Yongfei Ge, Eric Lui, Daehyuk Ko, Jabarin, Huiren Yang.... and a few others I've missed. Andy is the only one to have a rating above 3000.

From what we know in European competition, Fan could be the strongest of those players. I'd give that more credence than his ratings on the goratings site. But that still wouldn't suggest a rating significantly above 3000. That's a smaller distance behind Lee, but still a huge one.

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@Calvin (I see no point in hiding)


Google is very rich. They splashed $400 million on buying Deepmind, and even more on a fancy themostat (Nest). $1m is pocket change. This announcement has already gained them >$1m worth of press coverage and helped cement the image of Google as a bunch of clever clogs and will encourage smart people to want to work there.

I agree with your other 2 points though, but this lack of information isn't enough to make me think Lee will lose, though I wouldn't want to bet a lot on it.

I can't discuss marketing behavior of multinationals without a stiff drink, and I am out of scotch, so you win.