[dwaltrip]

I can't speak of their other work, but as someone who plays go and follows go bots, the AlphaGo project was a phenomenal piece of work that shouldn't be discounted. Go is a very difficult game that requires great intuition and a deep understanding of the patterns.

Sure, maybe their timing was fortunate and it might have happened a year later anyways. But this is definitely not a guarantee, and they were still the ones to do it.

P.S. For anyone who is interested, another very strong bot is out in the wild now. It has been playing on the KGS go server the past week under the name Zen19L, and has a rank of 9d. Some great games have resulted as people challenge it.

[jfv]

So is image recognition, but I think the main contention is that solving Go required little additional cleverness to what has already existed. The ideas of self-play, Monte Carto methods, and neural networks are not new and not novel for the problem. Not that it's so trivial -- I'm sure it took a while to work out the exact architecture and details, but what of that work actually teaches you something?

[dwaltrip]

The combination of the methods was certainly novel as far as I am aware. Also, it was not clear ahead of time that it would actually succeed in defeating the best humans. Demonstrating that it could be done is a grear achievement.

There is also the symbolic value. It was a "coming of age" event to a certain degree. I believe go was the last classic board game that researchers had been longing to conquer.

I haven't looked deeply into this, but my understanding is that image recognition is still somewhat subpart outside of well-curated datasets. Is that not the case anymore?

[randcraw]

By that token, IBM's wins at chess and Jeopardy also deserve to be seen as "coming of age" events. And while the wins certainly showcased IBM's engineering prowess, I'm unconvinced Deep Blue or Watson moved the AI needle in a meaningful way. If they had, others would have followed in their technical footsteps. But AFAIK, no one has. I believe this lack of high tech repercussion will be true of AlphaGo too. Novel AI for game play just doesn't transfer outside the game.

[dwaltrip]

You don't think Deep Blue was inspirational to folks who were perhaps deciding if they wanted to pursue AI research?

The same holds for AlphaGo and Watson. Also, my understanding is that they are more technically interesting than Deep Blue. Given how recent these projects are, their legacy is only beginning to unfold.

I agree with you that applying this tech to domains other than games is no easy challenge. But I would be very surprised, in the long run, if events like this are not documented as key steps along the way at some point in the future.

[jfv]

My problem is that what people seem to be saying now is that "computers are smart enough to solve Go now, thanks to Google".

1) Too much credit is given to Google for this result. What I see as already a huge brain drain on society is only going to get bigger.

2) People are going to expect that if "computers are smart enough to play Go", they're smart enough to do ____. What goes in the blank? Very little right now, but I guarantee you investors and the public have a lot of ideas and think it's around the corner.

Hopefully a lot of good things will come out of this wave of AI, but who knows what or when. I think the point is that there may be a panic and contraction before anything really awesome happens, and a lot of that is going to be because of "stunts" (for lack of a better word) like this being overhyped.