Gigaom AI Minute – February 12

Transcript

In 1983, the movie War Games came out. I was 15 years old at the time, and I saw the movie then, and have not seen it since. That was 35 years ago.

The premise, as you might remember, is that a computer is contemplating launching nuclear weapons to win a war game. Matthew Broderick, our star and hero, comes to the conclusion that he should play the computer in the game of tic-tac-toe a number of times to model for it something that it had not considered--a game that cannot be won. At first, he does this by playing the computer himself, but he couldn't play fast enough, and the launch sequence was winding down. So he had the computer play itself over and over again at the speed of light.

My memory of the quote of the computer when it comes to the conclusion, is that it was quote "an interesting game" and quote "the only way to win is not to play." In writing this podcast, I looked up the actual quote to find that the computer says that "it is a strange game in which the only winning move is not to play." Interesting that that one idea stuck in my head for 35 years.

I bring all of this up because this is the way we're training AIs right now, whether through adversarial networks or other systems, where we're getting the AIs to either play themselves or play each other to evolve better systems. Nowhere is this more evident than with AlphaGo Zero, the system that replaced AlphaGo after its spectacular win over Lee Sedol in the game of Go. AlphaGo Zero was not trained on Go with human games, but just played itself.

The implications of this are profound. We see that learning systems are learning ever faster and this is, in part, because we're getting better at training them, and that's becoming more refined, but it's mainly because our computers grow ever faster. In spite of what's been recently written about the limits of computer chips in their current forms, the theoretical speed of computers is vastly beyond what we are currently experiencing, and this, to my mind, is our best shot at making dramatic, new advances in artificial intelligence.