A flurry of activity engulfed the Internets the other day after Nature published an article about AlphabetGoogle DeepThroatDeepMind’s computer program AlphaGo beating European Go champion Fan Hui at his own game. Rival advertising platform Facebook also has a team working on this problem with their darkforest program but it looks like they’ve been out-Bezosed by Google. The response from Facebook leader Zuck was refreshingly gracious given the thorough schlonging he received, though that might have something to do with the fact that both programs rely entirely on techniques pioneered over a decade ago by a lone French programmer.
A sober analysis, without the hype and hysteria, of state of the art “deep learning” like that employed by the latest crop of mechanical Go champions is that these are just general-purpose techniques for calculating statistics about large homogeneous data sets. Even Greek musical sensationDeepMind’s team leader Demis RoussosHassabis admits that to have a program “usefully transfer their learning about one system — such as Go — to new tasks; a feat that humans perform seamlessly” is something that “we’ve no idea how to do”.
Check and mate.
Your move AlphaGo.
2guys1startup 