[Balgair]

> I am of the surprisingly-controversial opinion that ML’s future is going to be as a human empowerment tool — a bicycle for the mind, yet so much more.

In chess, these players are called centaurs. Per my limited knowledge of the current chess meta, they are considered to be much better than either people or AI in isolation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

[nopinsight]

Centaur chess did reign for a while. For AlphaZero, which has a strong ability to perform pattern recognition based on experience in a limited domain, humans may not be able to add value to its play.

That said, most board games are a very limited domain. Even more complex computer games prove more challenging than the current AI approach can handle without weaknesses (see comments about Dota on this page).

In complex real-world domains, humans can definitely still add much value relative to computers working by themselves.

[fighterpilot]

  "considered to be much better than either people or AI in isolation."

Is this really shown to be true?

[IsaacL]

I went down this rabbithole a few years ago. At the time, I looked around but couldn't find any more details about centaur chess, or evidence that centaurs could outplay AIs.

Then, last year, I stumbled across the following pair of articles. It's about the correspondence chess world championship, where both players are allowed to use engines, and (crucially) have a very long amount of time to analyse each position in-depth and consider long-range strategic implications of each move. The chap interviewed learned to exploit his opponent's over-reliance on the engine, and played in such a way that he was able to gradually accumulate small but compounding positional advantages that eventually gave him an edge. The whole time he used his own engine to catch tactical weaknesses in potential move sequences. A fascinating read.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

[esrauch]

There's correspondence play which allows engines (or any resource) and certain players which are consistently better at the game under those conditions.

Some of the other players surely try just running Stockfish overnight and taking whatever it says is the best move, and apparently that strategy isn't equally good.

Note that I think the "centaurs" are kind of playing a pretty different game than regular chess: they might have a knack for knowing when a particular engine is weak or strong and then trusting the corresponding engines lines more, or something like that.

[ghaff]

I don't think it's that controversial at this point. Especially given a growing sentiment that there are limits to where ML/DL can take us which we're reaching--and the general lack of success getting practical results from cognitive science, etc.--there seems to be a growing sentiment that we should be looking at augmented AI types of approaches.

[sillysaurusx]

Heck yeah, thank you! It's delightful that there's a name for it, because it seems like the first people to become centaurs in their day to day lives will have a massive advantage over those that want the purity of unguided AI.

I was eagerly hoping for a video of a centaur vs centaur tournament, but there seem to be none. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=centaur+chess

At least, not yet. Maybe someone could do a tournament with https://www.twitch.tv/gmnaroditsky or https://www.twitch.tv/gmhikaru? Actually, the Gotham Chess guy might: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1b-cuPDBZo&list=PLBRObSmbZl... He's always looking for new angles for his Youtube channel.

Centaurism isn't applicable to every situation -- Starcraft's AI kicks the butts of every pro player, because you can scale up and overwhelm your opponent. But there are often already humans in the mix, in these models. The humans are just designing the loss functions or deciding what to model, rather than using the results. So it's a "delayed" mechanical turk in that sense.

When done right, it's so effective that it feels like cheating^Wthe future: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1182208124117307392

Those are some of the nicest Stylegan outputs I've ever made. (Uh, do me a favor and ignore the Zeus one...)

Each of them were crafted. The process was to start with something, and that "something" often didn't need to be anything close. For example, if the photo is an old man, but stylegan's showing a kid, you turn up the "age" slider. Do that for every feature; it felt like the character creation screen in fallout.

Amazed it isn't an app yet. Artbreeder is nice, but it's not the same -- the key component was to have Peter Baylies' (follow him! https://twitter.com/pbaylies) reverse encoder as a button you can press. Whenever the model gets too far from what you're thinking, you press it, and it morphs the face back closer to the target photo. In the process, it might distort the age slightly, or make the chin a little bigger, but it's an anchor at sea; it's why you can nail your final result, every time.

I predict Centaurism might be popularized by gamedev. It's going to be pretty neat when some studio trains an RL algorithm vs someone's heart rate. Higher heart rate = more enjoyment, lots of the time, so you'd end up with either the funnest game or the scariest game you've ever seen.

Probably a decade away from that though.

[IsaacL]

Please see my comment to another post above, and read the following pair of links!

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

[ZephyrBlu]

> Starcraft's AI kicks the butts of every pro player, because you can scale up and overwhelm your opponent

Nah, it's because it has superhuman mechanics. If AlphaStar didn't rely so heavily on it's mechanics it might have produced interesting insights.

Everyone in the SC2 community was hoping for that, but it didn't really happen.

[rvba]

Was there any Starcraft tournament where the AI was limited to 200 apm and disabled maphack?

[WJW]

AlphaStar doesn't have maphack. It has more APM than 200 but so do the top players (and so do I on good days btw, and I'm only in Diamond 3). It does have insane mechanics that no human can match, like pixel perfect clicks every time and incredible reaction times.

One streamer (Lowko I think) analyzed a game he played against AlphaStar where it would "macro" by going to some position where you could just see all the production structures (some by only a few pixels on the edge of the screen) and just click all the button needed for unit production in a few milliseconds.

[rvba]

I am aware that Nada could have 400 apm in a 30 minute game, but most of it was spam.

Those Brood War bots had 36 thousand actions per minute and mainly due to technical limitations (the game couldnt accept more). And those were "perfect" clicks - not spam.

Limiting a bot to 200 actions (or even less) makes it more comparable to human, since at some point every click becomes a resource too. Even best players have to stop macro for some (relatively short) time. While AI with 36 000 clicks per minutr is not limited by time.

[gus_massa]

I don't remember that Lowko made that video. Besatyqt made a video where AlphaStar clicked on a Barrack that was barely visible at the top of the screen, but IIRC it was only once, not a systematic trick. In my opinion, if the AlphaStar team just reduce the clickable area of the screen, it would have seam natural.