Google AI Wins Pivotal Second Game in Match with Go Grandmaster

The thing to realize is that, after playing AlphaGo for the first time on Wednesday, Lee Sedol could adjust his style of play—just as Kasparov did back in 1996. But AlphaGo could not. Because this Google creation relies so heavily on machine learning techniques, the DeepMind team needs a good four to six weeks to train a new incarnation of the system. And that means they can’t really change things during this eight-day match.

“This is about teaching and learning,” Hassabis told us just before Game Two. “One game is not enough data to learn from—for a machine—and training takes an awful lot of time.”

.. Following Game One, Lee Sedol acknowledged he was “shocked” by how well AlphaGo played and said he’d made a notable mistake at the beginning of the game that led to his loss about three hours later. “The failure I made at the very beginning of the game lasted until the the very end,” he said, through an interpreter. “I didn’t think that AlphaGo would play the game in such a perfect manner.” It’s unclear what early mistake he was referring to.

.. the current version of AlphaGo not only plays more aggressively. It makes fewer mistakes.

.. “Although we have programmed this machine to play, we have no idea what moves it will come up with,” Graepel said. “Its moves are an emergent phenomenon from the training. We just create the data sets and the training algorithms. But the moves it then comes up with are out of our hands—and much better than we, as Go players, could come up with.”

.. AlphaGo does not attempt to maximize its points or its margin of victory. It tries to maximize its probability of winning. So, Graepel said, if AlphaGo must choose between a scenario where it will win by 20 points with 80 percent probability and another where it will win by 1 and a half points with 99 percent probability, it will choose the latter.

Time to Face the Hard Truth: The Sky Isn’t Falling on America

Only in a truly demoralized conservative movement could the crass materialism of Donald Trump find a foothold. That kind of nihilistic energy reflects more than just economic anxiety. It evidences a deeper sense of despair about the moral and cultural trajectory of our society.

.. They loved Manchester United but seemed to have little interest in Uzbek soccer. Midway through my service I got an idea of why that might be. Some soccer-loving American friends started going to local games. As longtime fans of the sport, they were strongly under the impression that at least some of the games were fixed. A match would proceed normally for awhile, but in the last few minutes the leading team might start making obvious, clownish mistakes that would ultimately lead to a loss. My friends found it hard to believe that this phenomenon was natural.

.. On the other hand, a society that demands fair football games is positioned to navigate these other problems. We still have a strong sense of fair play, a zeal for excellence, and the kind of political foundation that can sustain a free society.

 

Understanding Obama Through Basketball

Alexander Wolff, a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, argues that basketball has been a “touchstone” in Obama’s “exercise of the power of the presidency,” and that he has used it “more often and more effectively than any previous president had used any sport.” It was a campaign tool during Obama’s first run for the Presidency: scenes of him playing basketball on the trail highlighted his youthful vigor and, as Wolff writes, “undermined Republican efforts to portray Obama as foreign, suspicious, or someone who ‘pals around with terrorists.’ ”

.. “At least on the basketball court I could find a community of sorts, with an inner life all its own,” Obama writes. “It was there that I would make my closest white friends, on turf where blackness couldn’t be a disadvantage.” The court was a plausibly fair and meritocratic space where the best might flourish, but also a place where ideas about race were inescapable.

.. Obama’s brother-in-law, the college coach Craig Robinson, identified the President as being “extremely left-handed,” meaning that he can’t go right. (This fact has perhaps been underutilized by the President’s Republican opponents.)