Movie Review - AlphaGo
I know I haven’t really written about “science” since I started but bare with me. I’m still new to the blog thing. Plus I don't want to write about the sound barrier even though I spent an hour learning about it a few nights ago and the post I want to write, about the Gemini missions, is going to take longer than I thought.
So in the interest of at least posting once or twice a week - here is my rave review of the AlphaGo documentary about the Deepmind AlphaGo neural network and the game of Go. The movie has over 20 million views on YouTube.
The movie is pretty straightforward - some engineers programmed a computer, AlphaGo, to play the game of Go. And to test the strength of their AI system, they had it play against one of the world’s best Go players. It’s tense and exciting to watch.
A quote from the opening of the movie:
“Go is putting you in a place where you’re at the very farthest reaches of your capacity. There’s a reason why people have been playing Go for thousands and thousands of years. It’s not just that they want to understand Go - they want to understand what understanding is. And maybe that’s what is truly means to be human”
Here are the rules of Go as is written on the DeepMind website:
“Two players, using either white or black stones, take turns placing their stones on a board. The goal is to surround and capture their opponent's stones or strategically create spaces of territory. Once all possible moves have been played, both the stones on the board and the empty points are tallied. The highest number wins.
As simple as the rules may seem, Go is profoundly complex. There are an astonishing 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations - more than the number of atoms in the known universe. This makes the game of Go a googol times more complex than chess.”
A really interesting thing about the movie is seeing the surprise in the people watching the game as AlphaGo plays each move. AlphaGo does what they thought would be impossible for a computer program as it plays with creativity, making novel moves outside of what most people would ever think to play. It’s really fun cause the documentary also shows the engineering team that’s monitoring the AI’s calculations.
Even while AlphaGo is making moves that all the spectators thought no human would make, it is also calculating the chance a human would make that move.
The movie does a great job of balancing the big picture implications of AI while also showcasing the very real challenges of trying to replicate the complexity of the human mind. In the end - it is clear that humans will be competing with neural networks that greatly surpass our capabilities at some point in the future. What does this mean for us? Guh. What will superintelligence look like? Will we be able to communicate our values to it? What are human values? There are no clear answers to any of this but whoa, these are important questions to ask.
It’s an exciting time to be alive eh? Elon Musk is taking us to Mars and merging our brains with computers, viruses are wreaking havoc on our economies and way of life and super intelligent computers are coming. What will the future be like when it arrives?