AI research in Japan

[John Fairbairn]

Research into the AIs continues apace everywhere. I don't have time to follow what is happening in Korea and China, and even for Japan I can just spare enough time to pass only a quick eye over what they are writing (which is quite a lot).

There are many similarities between what they are looking at and what people are looking at here in L19 (though without the mathematical mumbo-jumbo), but in my opinion the conclusions and interpretations seem to me to be of a significantly higher standard there. Which is what you would expect really, as they are pros and they are working on this full time. Plus they have easier access to what pros in Korea and Japan are saying.

One of the more interesting things they have been looking at, I thought, was a series of graphs with y-axis win rate and x-axis number of moves, for AI vs human and AI self-play separately.

They have identified three main types of graph. There is the slider, where the graph shows the win rate continuously dropping in a smooth slide. Then there is the Niagara type (we might have called that falling off a cliff) where the win rate stays high and flat then suddenly goes over the edge.

The third type may be the most interesting, especially in self-play games. They call this the jagged or notched or dentate type (giza-giza), where the win rate stays more or less level but proceeds with lots of sharp notches (so the image is a bit like castle battlements), and can even go up. One tentative conclusion about this type is that the bot doesn't know what it's doing - is making mistakes!

This sort of research can easily be replicated here. Maybe it's already been done. Sorry if I've missed it.

[Uberdude]

I've been posting winrate graphs of my playing as LeelaZero on Fox, such as viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16198&p=241836#p241836, or the previous game has 2 cliffs with big blunders. I've not played any top pros, but LZ beat Han Zenki 8p easily with a "slider": viewtopic.php?p=240789#p240789.

The winrate graphs also tell a nice story for human games, such as my recent tournament games: contrast the smooth slider victory with a chaotic mistake-fest of a middlegame from a leading position: viewtopic.php?p=241268#p241268. Of course humans of my level can easily make 50% mistakes and throw away games LZ sees as a safe >90% win, and pros too but less often.

Or here are some pro games: viewtopic.php?p=241697#p241697.

[Kirby]

I’m sure it’s not hard to have a higher standard for drawing conclusions than what we have on L19, but “mathematical mumbo-jumbo” seems useful to make any meaningful interpretations...

[sorin]

I just learned about a Japanese article discussing how Nihon Ki-in pros use Lizzie via Amazon Web Services (AWS), rather than on personal computers.

There is some mention of monthly prices between thousands and tens of thousands of yen (tens of thousands of yen amounts to hundreds of USD so it sounds a bit expensive just for single personal use on a regular basis).

These is a mention of easy to use guides made by some pro, so any other Nihon Ki-in pro, even without prior experience with web services, can start an instance of Lizzie in the cloud:


There is also a mention in the article about how the language changed based on Lizzie's color scheme ("blue move", "green move"), and also some patterns such as "hives" (when LZ is exploring all or almost all of the board).

The article is published in what looks like an online IT magazine, I guess that is why the focus is AWS: https://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/ar ... ws006.html

[ez4u]

Yesterday (Saturday) I was at the Nihon Ki'in as usual. I met Rin Shien 8p, an off and on drinking buddy that I had not run into in a while. He was there for the Senko Cup, rooting for Taiwan (where he was born). He whipped out his iPad and showed me how he uses Chrome Remote Desktop to log into his PC at home and run Lizzie remotely! I couldn't believe it (he clearly has a much more powerful gpu than I do).

I had to get on the net and find out what is going on. Turns out it was simple. I am not so sure about giving Google such overt control of my PC, but here is a picture of Lizzie running on my desktop, controlled from my iPad.

Lizzie on iPad via Chrome Remote Desktop.jpg (155.25 KiB) Viewed 7439 times

[Mike Novack]

He whipped out his iPad and showed me how he uses Chrome Remote Desktop to log into his PC at home and run Lizzie remotely! I couldn't believe it

I had to get on the net and find out what is going on. Turns out it was simple. I am not so sure about giving Google such overt control of my PC ........

OK, we perhaps shpould discuss this. When people see others (to theri eyes) running one of these strong AI programs on some little device, need to consider that the little device is running a "terminal emulator" sort of program.

That's right, the last decade or so of my working days I had a company provided weak PC (retired from being one of our desktops), a relatively slow modem also retired (but to be fair, a military spec Hayes, was about as fast over our noisy phone line as the newer US Robotics modems that had replaced it even those were supposedly 4x faster), and a phone line. But all that obsolete PC was being required to do was run a terminal emulator for my session actually running on the mainframe 50 miles away. The slow connection fast enough when all that was being sent back and forth text screen images.

I do NOT know what you meant by giving "Google" such control. There might be a variety of "remote log in" apps that your hand device could use besides Chrome Remote Desktop. He perhaps didn't see the need for a high level of security.

[sorin]

Yesterday (Saturday) I was at the Nihon Ki'in as usual. I met Rin Shien 8p, an off and on drinking buddy that I had not run into in a while. He was there for the Senko Cup, rooting for Taiwan (where he was born). He whipped out his iPad and showed me how he uses Chrome Remote Desktop to log into his PC at home and run Lizzie remotely! I couldn't believe it (he clearly has a much more powerful gpu than I do).

I had to get on the net and find out what is going on. Turns out it was simple. I am not so sure about giving Google such overt control of my PC, but here is a picture of Lizzie running on my desktop, controlled from my iPad.

Lizzie on iPad via Chrome Remote Desktop.jpg

Ah, very cool, it took me about 3 min to set it up as well.
I guess this explains a video I saw recently online, it was showing Iyama and a couple of other pros analyzing his recently lost game with Park, using a phone, and I was not sure how where they doing that since I am not aware of any phone app at top pro level, but I guess they were remoting into a powerful computer using Lizzie: https://twitter.com/YikeGo_en/status/10 ... 3430439937

How to interact with Lizzie though from a mobile device though, since Lizzie is heavily keyboard controlled?

[ez4u]

He whipped out his iPad and showed me how he uses Chrome Remote Desktop to log into his PC at home and run Lizzie remotely! I couldn't believe it (he clearly has a much more powerful gpu than I do).

Interesting idea. It's also possible that he uses a cloud GPU. I've set this up for Google Cloud using Benjamin Teuber's instructions, or maybe he is using AWS, which seems to be popular among Japanese Go professionals, as described in the article 囲碁AIブームに乗って、若手棋士の間で「AWS」が大流行　その理由とは？; apparently Ohashi Hirofumi 6p is quite involved in the Japanese Go AI scene and provides help to other pros who want to use Leela Zero on AWS.

Yes, I heard about the young pros using AWS from their notebooks since last summer. However, this was him using his own desktop at home.