sorin wrote:
What puzzles me is that AlphaZero cannot be many handicap stones away from "perfect play": a 100-0 score suggests more than one stone handicap difference in strength, so hearing David Silver saying that he expects at least 20 or so more generations where each beats the previous one 100-0 seems very counter-intuitive.
Even if 100-0 doesn't mean one handicap stone difference, but only means 1 point difference in final scoring, it doesn't seem to me that we can expect a gap between current top AlphaZero-like engines and "perfect play" to be 20 points or more...
Well, we used to think that humans were at most 4 stones away from perfect play, but current top bots, despite their obvious imperfections, seem to be around 3 stones better than humans, despite not being trained for handicap play. Now, I think that humans will get at least one stone better in the coming decade, because we can learn from the bots. Even I, as an old dog, have gotten better at predicting their plays.
What about youngsters who are growing up with bots available?
Back in the 1960s or 70s
Sports Illustrated ran an article comparing improvements for both men and women in a variety of sporting events. While both sexes showed steady improvement, the graphs of the men's improvement were starting to bend towards level, while the women's graphs continued straight up. The men's abilities were showing signs of starting to reach their limits, but not the women's. According to the Elf team, Elf's abilities have not shown signs of reaching their limit, given exponential growth in search. At some point, surely the law of diminishing returns will kick in, but we have little evidence that it has started to do so yet. If the gap between top bots and perfect play were only 20 pts., I think that we would see some bending of the curve. (OC, to say top bot without specifying its search or time parameters is not really appropriate, as they matter to its strength.)