[skarist]

Great game and amazing series/match. This last one was absolutely nail biting. My hat off to the AlphaGo team and to Mr. Lee Sedol. Sedol showed incredible fighting spirit and stamina. Just imagine sitting through a 5 hour game like that last one, with full concentration all the time. And seeing the expression of exhaustion and disappointment on Sedol's face after last moves and his resignation. Phew... I bet that he came in rather confident into this last game, after beating AlphaGo in the fourth, figuring he had found a weakness. And he seemed to have a rather good start, securing a decent territory in the lower right corner. We can all marvel at the machine/software the DeepMind team has built, but still I feel that the real marvel is the human brain. Will we learn anything from this series, about how it functions and evaluates game positions in a stratetgic games? The classic problem/mystery is how extremely good the human brain is at pruning game-trees. Whole branches are thrown out in split seconds and probably never explored. Currently taking a watt-for-watt comparison there is no question about whose "hardware" is superior -> Lee Sedol's brain. But I guess the DeepMind team and the community will take plenty of lessons from this and in a few years span, Lee Sedol's phone will beat him 100% of the time. At least I wouldn't be willing to bet against it, even though we are hitting the roof in Moore's law.

[eggie]

I would love to compare the energy requirements of the AlphaGo and Mr. Sedol. I imagine there are many orders of magnitude in difference between them. Perhaps the most fair comparison would be between a computer that uses no more energy than a human does. Or, to let the human work with a computer provided they do not use more total energy to play the game.

[frabcus]

Nice question!

To make it fair, do you include the energy used to train it? From scratch, or from the amateur human game data?

Likewise, do you include the energy used to evolve the human brain?

[eggie]

> Likewise, do you include the energy used to evolve the human brain?

I was thinking of this in a limited, human-promoting sense. We shouldn't lose sight of our own special powers just because a computer the size of a house can outsmart us in a specialized domain :)

[PeCaN]

...Especially when, you know, we made that computer....

That's the really impressive part IMO. AlphaGo is an incredibly cool creation. Hats off to the DeepMind team.

[eru]

In chess, your smartphone that uses less energy than your brain, can already beat the world champions. Go might get there in a few years.