Playing Go probably won’t lead to better AI

The traditional Chinese board game Go. (Wikipedia)

Go is a traditional Chinese game that is played by two players and involves placing stones on a board in order to capture the opponent’s stones.

Although the rules are quite simple, and there is perfect information, the strategies involved are quite complex. The very best software available today that plays this game is not able to beat professional players for many reasons, including the number of possible moves and the large size of the board (compared to chess).

Now Demis Hassabis, who was behind DeepMind (purchased by Google in 2014), has hinted that his team has managed to get a machine to play the board game Go. Previously, the team has demonstrated an AI learning to play old video games like Breakout. The algorithms have learned to play without help better than most humans, so this team knows a thing or two about designing algorithms to learn to play games.

I’m a little skeptical though about how much conquering Go will advance the field of AI. Back in the 1990s, much excitement and publicity was generated when IBM’s Deep Blue managed to beat the reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. However, this feat was more down to processing power and Deep Blue’s ability to evaluate millions of positions per second than any real advance in machine intelligence.

Certainly Kasparov didn’t play that way and so Deep Blue didn’t really give any great insights into human intelligence. While it may be interesting, beating a human at Go may well turn out to be another example of Artificial Narrow Intelligence.

via Google DeepMind Founder Says AI Machines Have Beat Board Game Go | Re/code.

Go Board Game (Wikipedia)

Poker Pros Win Against Carnegie Mellon AI

A few weeks ago in another post, I mentioned that three human professional poker players were going up against an Artificial Intelligence called Claudico. Time to check in at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh to see how they got on.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Blacklight supercomputer which hosted Claudico

Over the week, the professionals played 80,000 hands of no-limit hold ’em poker against the AI. Three of the four players ended up with more chips than the computer, so it would seem that for now, humans still hold the advantage.

In the final chip tally, Bjorn Li had an individual chip total of $529,033, Doug Polk had $213,671 and Dong Kim had $70,491. Jason Les trailed Claudico by $80,482.

However, the actual winnings as a percentage of the amounts being bet over the week ($170m), means that the result is much closer than would appear. So just like Deep Blue in the 1990’s, the AI doesn’t seem to be too far away from an outright win.

Brains Vs. AI | Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

Carnegie Mellon Computer Faces Poker Pros in Epic No-Limit Texas Hold’Em Competition

One of the main areas of Artificial Intelligence research has been into game playing. In many games such as chess and draughts, there is perfect information. Each move a player makes is seen by the other player.

Some games have elements of chance, in addition to perfect information. Backgammon is a good example, where each move a player makes is governed by the roll of a dice. Still, there is perfect information available as to the state of the board.

Texas Hold’Em Poker – Todd Klassy

Poker is an interesting game by contrast as there is uncertainty about the state of the game. The only things a play knows for certain are his or her own cards (and in the case of Texas Hold ‘Em, the shared cards). Everything else must be estimated using some element of probability. In the case of poker, it would be what cards the other players have and the probability of the cards to be dealt by the dealer during the betting rounds.

There are various techniques and strategies employed by human players, including reading the body language of the other players. This is probably beyond today’s level of AI, but that hasn’t stopped a team from Carnegie Mellon University from having a go. From April 24th until the 8th May, an AI will be playing a heads-up no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em against professional players. It will be interesting to see if it can follow in the footsteps of Deep Blue, the AI that defeated the then world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, in 1996.

For the latest score in the match, see Brains vs AI at Carnegie Mellon