Mission Control Room

[RobertJasiek]

During the AlphaGo - Lee Sedol match, there was a local "mission control room" for operating the local hardware. Besides there were the many cores in data centers somewhere around the world, including, IIUC, a live backup instance of AlphaGo. One aspect is maintenance of communication (impressive enough!), another is abiding by the tournament rules. Maybe it was just handled by mutual trust, and I am not suggesting that anything dubious has happened.

OTOH, it requires very great trust when $1,000,000 is at stake. The temptation that a dark friend 9p might help a computer team could be great in such events. Surely, this time we can simply assume everything was perfectly honest. OTOH, in the long run, it would be surprising if cheating would never occur.

Did tournament directors have meaningful supervision in the mission control center and data centers, would they simply never enter such rooms, or would they but see nothing but - to them - meaningless contents on the displays?

Back to the maintenance of communication: how were permanent power supply, fast and stable internet connection and running computers ensured?

[longshanks]

I think Kasperov was wary of human intervention in '96 or whenever was his match against IBM's DeepBlue. He was riled by a human-like move and never really recovered.

Obviously there's no easy way to check, other than handing over the raw data and calculations (which might just happen!) at a later date so as to provide an audit to AlphaGo's 'thinking'.

The other issues of high availability and failover are well known problems for cloud companies such as Google (though not perfect). People like Google deliberately failover often just to constantly test resiliance (monkeys/gremlins I forget what they call them). They probably used their very own Google compute Engine as it's a known quantity. In any case it will all be virtualised IaaS. I know Google use Debian for this. The front end of AlphaGo appeared to be in Ubuntu, though this may have been DeepMinds call rather than Google's.

Microsoft's Azure and Office365 goes down as does Amazon's AWS and even Google services. All these things will fail eventually. All you can do is learn from your mistakes, much like Go

P.S. Google's engineer did say in Game 5 that they wired up everything themselves.. and brought their own fibre in.

[EdLee]

There was a similar accusation for Deep Blue v. Kasparov, Game 6.

To me, such allegations are extremely ignorant, myopic, and insulting to the computer team.

( Conspiracy theorists accused DM of human help/intervention;
at one of the Q&A sessions in Seoul,
didn't at least one reporter ask (a) whether DM and Mr. YSD had fixed the games;
and/or (b) DM and Mr. YSD had agreed to avoid kos ?!
-- Preposterous. )

[longshanks]

Ed, if you think player conspiracy theories are bad enough check out this nonsense:

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/na ... 00231.html

[pookpooi]

The worst conspiracy theory I've seen is 'I think my $80 CrazyStone 2012 coupled with 1,200 CPUs will play just about the same level as AlphaGo'

[xed_over]

from https://twitter.com/mustafasuleymn

[Jhyn]

OTOH, it requires very great trust when $1,000,000 is at stake. The temptation that a dark friend 9p might help a computer team could be great in such events.

$1,000,000 were not at stake on Google's side, since they pledged to give them to charity in the case of an AlphaGo victory. Google payed this sum in order to set up the match; they were not playing for money. I would even suggest that this was a voluntary choice from them to remove what people could perceive as an incentive to cheat.

[sybob]

Legitimate question OP. Is an issue.

[longshanks]

Looks like 'top' running in one console and a 'root tail' in another.

OOooooh I'd love to have been in that control room!

[Pio2001]

The reasons why they didn't cheat :

-The making of Deepmind and AlphaGo has been accepted for publication in the Nature scientific journal. Only the top scientific research can win the right to be published there. If the content had been void or made-up, it wouldn't have passed through the review comitee.

-Human players capable of beating Lee Sedol 4-1 are a handful in the world. You can't achieve this with ordinary 9-dan pros.

-The idea that Lee would have lost on purpose is nonsensical. His strenght in go is still high enough to provide him comfortable income. That would have ruined all he has been living for. And Fan Hui lost too.

[RobertJasiek]

Indeed. Nevertheless, if I were responsible as tournament director, I would at least try to do some supervision and let the tournament rules presume the players' fair behaviour.

[Pippen]

-The idea that Lee would have lost on purpose is nonsensical. His strenght in go is still high enough to provide him comfortable income. That would have ruined all he has been living for.

I disagree. They could easily find ways to bribe him. For instance Fan Hui became a (paid!) memeber of Deepmind after his loss. Coincidence? He certainly will make more and steady money by working for Deepmind than what he would have earned as a european pro. Easily to imagine a plot there. The same with Lee Sedol, just it would need more to bribe him.

If we talk about a plot we talk about a soft one (to deceive the public effectively) like that they gave Sedol x in return for him to play not 100% but only 95%. And you must admit he made a couple of not-so-good-moves. He could have won game 1 and game 5 relatively easy with precise game. That'd have made it 3-2 overall.

Google is a powerful firm and this win meant A LOT of reputation which is like gold in the future.

Now, I don't say there was some foul play, I justjust it is possible.

[RobertJasiek]

He could have won game 1 and game 5 relatively easy with precise game.

Good rumour for a conspiracy theory but hard to justify by go theory.

[sybob]

Conspiracy theories are due to come up regarding this match.
Everything is possible, everything is imaginable.

It might also have been staged, in some sort of form or degree, for political and business reasons. The match gave Google enormous presence in China, which they aimed for since long. It can be their breakthrough. And if Koreans and Chinese don't always mix very good, one can also see (fictitious) reasons why Lee Sedol lost. Other reasons for foul play can be found in the betting/bookmaking industry.

Regarding foul play, I think something else is also possible. One can easily suggest that the 4th game was lost by AlphaGo on purpose, to save face for Lee Sedol.

I like to suggest to leave it at rest.

[Pippen]

Good rumour for a conspiracy theory but hard to justify by go theory.

Absolutely.

Now, I'd appreciate if one doesn't call stuff like that conspiracy theories, because nobody here claims it.