Official website launched
http://events.google.com/alphago2017/

Rumor around weibo that not only the new AlphaGo will learning without human game record, but it also doesn't use Monte Carlo Tree Search

http://www.weibo.com/p/23041873040b820102wwci

My opinion, is this even possible? Please take this as a grain of salt. But there's information that DeepMind dedicated the whole day (24th) to conference. (Is someone roaming through DeepMind presentation slides without permission? That's very bad)

Any chance you can post the weibo info without the need for us to login there?

The Nature paper stated that neural-network only (no MCTS) version of AlphaGo was already stronger than all other commercial computer-go games at the time of Fan Hui match, but way weaker than the MCTS version.
It sounds impossible at first sight to think that a pure static analysis version, without MCTS, would be stronger than a pro; on the other hand, with a very deep neural-network architecture, I guess it may be possible, since some of the layers of the network would effectively do some "reading ahead". Just speculating here.

For me it doesn't require sign up to access weibo, it just that they're in Chinese language, but here in spoiler.

It's important to note that saying this new version of AlphaGo doesn't do Monte Carlo Tree Search is not the same as saying it doesn't do tree search, though I don't know if that technical precision was lost in translation. You could have a tree search version which constructs a game tree using a policy network to suggest moves, and a value network to evaluate nodes in that tree without doing monte-carlo rollouts to the end of the game. In their published work so far combining the rollouts with the value network gives the best results, but as the networks keep getting better it wouldn't surprise me if tree+policy+value+rollouts was now 15p strength and tree+policy+value "only" 13p and therefore good enough for the upcoming match.

anyone got a spare hat to eat or talk through?

hats off to the PorkyPie guys who know a good Bernays story to get the chattering classes chattering

no tree search... ho ho ho... sometimes people can't see the forest for the spin-fluff. [correction: delete 'sometimes' insert 'always' eg Persil washes whiter, Coca-Cola refreshes you, Bay of Pigs, Bay of Tonkin, Baywatch, government by the people, in God we trust, etc].

check out the esteemed opinions of L19 experts this time last year - about as reliable as a pre-Brexit poll.

so far Swim is the only bot to have bettered the dog, and with < 1 googleplexth of the dosh too

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i shrink, therefore i swarm

The way I read it, it was just that, no real read-ahead but just:
1. Policy net to generate some good candidate moves.
2. Value net to select the one leading to most favorable position after the next-move.

I know I shouldn't bite, but here goes...

Swim is not a bot: it is the beginnings of a design for a bot with a lot of implementation details outstanding. If by "bettered the dog" you mean provided a post-hoc rationalisation of the correct answer to Lee Sedol's wedge in game 4 then you are wrong: Leela plays the correct move too for example (and without a human operator who already knows the correct answer to guide it). Leela is a bot which actually exists because it has been coded and can run on its own without a human operating filling in the gaps. And is just a one-man-band too so a lot cheaper than AlphaGo.

man bites dog, except Swim isn't a dog, she's a lion. J13...L10 was pre-hoc, not post-hoc. Leela plays L10 too? If true, that's interesting - it suggests maybe the dog out-thunk itself, and could do so again...

Oh, the excitement, the tension! Will Jie, won't he, will he, won't he, won't you join the dance? That must be worth something, porky?

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i shrink, therefore i swarm

I missed some post somewhere, maybe, but what is the connection between "AlphaGo", "alphadog", and this entity we are referring to as "dog"?

Are these all references to AlphaGo? If so, why?

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be immersed

Thanks, it makes sense now

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be immersed

Totally off-topic therefore hidden.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Ha, food for thought...

(Via Vincent Lejeune’s post on FB, thank you!)



<edit>
Uhm, the blank space above is this: Could it be that our YouTube tags still rely on http instead of on https? “Or something”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs1sFJ94rAU
</edit>

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I actually posted that on Reddit before but decided not to post here because L19 doesn't support YouTube embed.
Or maybe it's supported but intentionally disabled by webmaster.

Thanks. I fixed this, so your post shows the video, now.

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be immersed

Never mind the quality truth, feel the spin-width

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i stink, therefore i glam

I see that there's going to be a stream at the DeepMind site, but will there be any live commentaries? I think I'm too tired tonight, but I'll probably end up staying up to watch the beginning in spite of that.

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Occupy Babel!

Michael Redmond and Stephanie Yin are commenting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-HL5nppBnM, which I think is the same as the DeepMind stream.