house-alpha-go-2-1200

AlphaGo and Computer Creativity

 

An important feature of a learning machine is that its teacher will often be very largely ignorant of quite what is going on inside, although he may still be able to some extent to predict his pupil’s behavior… This is in clear contrast with normal procedure when using a machine to do computations [as] one’s object is then to have a clear mental picture of the state of the machine at each moment in the computation. This object can only be achieved with a struggle. The view that “the machine can only do what we know how to order it to do,”‘ appears strange in face of this. – Alan Turing

 

The above section of Alan Turing’s text “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” caught my attention in relation to the encounter back in March between Google’s AlphaGo system, and Lee Sedol (one of the top Go players in the world today). Widely regarded as the most challenging game on the planet, Go was due to it’s great complexity and astronomically vast move-tree thought un-suited for AI’s to tackle, as the usual “brute-force” (if/then) approach common to chess engines (the Deep Blue chess engine of IBM notoriously toppled world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1998) is simply too ineffective to handle Go at the level at which top professionals play the game. However, AlphaGo is not a system based on brute-force analysis. It has achieved it’s level of play through machine learning, and deep neural networks. After an initial period of being given feedback by human supervisors as to the validity of move suggestions, AlphaGo was eventually let loose on databases containing millions of professional games—teaching itself through evaluations and comparisons the way human professionals play the game of Go. What was astounding, however (and a great surprise to a great many, yours truly included), was that not only did AlphaGo display a level of play on par with human professionals, it several times throughout the match came up with what commentators and other Go professionals alike could only describe as “creative moves”, moves that stumped not only Lee Sedol, but even AlphaGo’s own creators. Moves and sequences invented (yes, why not?) by AlphaGo during those five games have since been put to further use by, among others, Sedol himself.

For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of AI is the way in which it can force humanity to rethink what concepts such as “creativity” (or even “intelligence” for that matter) really implies. Be it in the field of Arts or abstract strategy games, further development of AI will hopefully see humanity humbled, renegotiating it’s place among other intelligences, be they electronic or organic in origin.

 

Leave a Reply

2 Comments on "AlphaGo and Computer Creativity"

Notify of
avatar
Sort by:   newest | oldest | most voted
Eva Krarup
Editor
Eva Krarup

Hi Sebastian, interesting read. Concepts like ‘creativity’ definitely requires our attention these years, when reading your post and especially the last paragraph I came to think of an article that I read some days ago called “Dit næste idol bliver din computer” (“Your next idol will be your computer”) that discussed the use of computers in creative processes and in the making of art. Do you know that Google has recently established a project called Magenta to examine further the creativity of computers and how machines can be used to create compelling art and music? (Link here: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/welcome-to-magenta).

Alexander Wilson
Editor
Alexander Wilson
What I love in this example is that, only a few years ago, say, when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, everyone was astonished that a computer could beat a human at such a game. 20 years later, AlphaGo plays Sedol and everyone is astonished at the exact opposite, that Sedol was even able to compete on the level of the AI, is capable of envisioning the innumerable different ramifications of each play in vivid clarity. Our culture has evolved quite a bit, from complete skepticism that machines could replace humans at even the most basic tasks, to complete acceptance that eventually… Read more »
wpDiscuz