Jon Diamond, president of the British Go Association, said machines are five to 10 years ahead of where he expected them to be. “It’s really quite a large, sudden leap in strength,” he said. “This is a significantly better result than any other computer Go program has achieved up to now.”
Technology that improves exponentially will do that to you. Once somebody has a program that is sort of on the right track, you feed it more data and give it more processing power. Once the computer starts to get in the same range as the human, it very quickly races past and leaves the human in the dust.
As Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok puts it,
Win or lose, I will bet that Lee Sedol is the last human champion the world will ever know.
“In February 2013, Lee announced that he was planning to retire in three years “. Perhaps not a smart bet by Alex T, not Tyler.
“Retire?”
I guess every professional board gamer needs to know when it is his time to not Go.
Minor corrections dept. That was Alex Tabarrok’s quote, not Tyler’s.
I was surprised by Tyler’s post about self-driving cars not really being around the corner in a commercial sense. I think he is severely underestimating the progress to date and the investment committed / underway. The “summon a car” app will be all the rage by 2020. That’s the race to watch, uber vs Lift vs Amazon.
However, Tyler’s thoughts are great as always.
Though in this case, the innovation was an approach that economized on technological demands eliminating the need for exhaustive search.