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Showerthought: my old boss bet me $20 that neural nets would never beat humans at Go, and I took the bet
Back in 2014 I was working a data entry job in Columbus and my boss Dave, who had been coding since punch cards, said no machine would ever outplay a human at Go because of how big the board state is. I took his $20 and forgot about it until AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in 2016, and Dave handed me the cash with this weird look on his face. Has anyone else had a skeptic in their life get proven wrong by a big AI moment, and did it change how they think about the tech?
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jesse_smith105d ago
That weird look on Dave's face is the real story here. What makes Go different from chess is that humans couldn't even explain why we were good at it. We just felt it. So when the machine won, there was nothing to point at and say oh it copied our rules. It built its own feeling for the game from scratch. Your boss spent 40 years thinking he knew how computers work, then one showed him a kind of knowing he didn't know was possible. Twenty bucks was cheap for that lesson.
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