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0 pointsYeGoblynQueenne5y ago0 comments

>> Are we certain that well-trained human players are not doing search?

Yes- because human players can only search a tiny portion of a game tree and a minimax search of the same extent is not even sufficient to beat a dedicated human in tic-tac-to, leta lone chess. That is, unless one wishes to countenance the possibility of an "unconscious search" which of course might as well be "the grace of God" or any such hand-wavy non-explanation.

>> It's possible that a search subnetwork gets "compiled without debugger symbols" and the owner of the brain is simply unaware that it's happening.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean.

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oezi5y ago

Why do you dismiss the unconscious search that humans do in Go? Having learned Go some years ago it is such an exciting thing to realize that with practice the painstaking process of consciously evaluating the myriads possibilities of moves gives way to just "seeing" solutions out of nothing. You can really feel that your brain did wire itself up to do analysis for you at a level that is subconscious but interfaces so gracefully with your conscious cognition that it is a real marvel.

YeGoblynQueenneOP5y ago

>> Why do you dismiss the unconscious search that humans do in Go?

The question is why you say that humans perform an unconscious search when they play Go. And what kind of search is it, other than unconscious? Could you describe it, e.g. in algorithmic notation? I mean, I'm sure you couldn't because if you could then the problem of teaching a computer to play Go as well as a human would have been solved years and years ago. But, if you can't describe what you're doing, then how do you know it's a "search"?

Note that in AI, when we talk of "search" (edit: at least, in the context of game-playing) we mean something very specific: an algorithm that examines the nodes of a tree and applies some criterion to label each examined node as a target node or not a target node. Humans are absolutely awful at executing such an algorithm with our minds for any but the most trivial of trees, at least compared to computers.

acidbaseextract5y ago

Here's a section of Michael Redmond's (9-dan professional Go player) commentary on the Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo matches: https://youtu.be/yCALyQRN3hw?t=3031

It's really fun to watch his commentary because he relentlessly plays "variations" — possible next moves and sequences — while waiting for the players, explaining the tradeoffs between moves and the consequences they lead to a few steps ahead in the game.

I don't know what to call "variations" but a tree search with heuristics. He does it slowly to explain it to the audience, but I have no doubt the same process runs much faster in his mind.

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fxtentacle5y ago

I believe humans do look up tables. If pattern X, then deny possibilities Y and Z. And then you more or less consciously choose one of the remaining options.

If you can avoid making "obvious" (in retrospect) mistakes, you will be a competitive chess or go player.

And given that we have millions of neurons to suppress activity in one node if activity was high enough in another node, I would summarize the brain as effectively a huge chain of look up tables.

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