No one's expecting cleverness to be unnecessary to *build* the thing...
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Replying to @shlevy @admittedlyhuman
If AlphaGo were presented as an incremental engineering result in function approximation methods, no one would have been interested. The hype is that it’s a breakthrough in modeling human intuition.
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Replying to @Meaningness @shlevy
you don't think anyone would have been interested in a computer program that could beat the best human go players???
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Replying to @admittedlyhuman @shlevy
My expectation is that, without a massive disinformational PR campaign, the public would not have considered that at all interesting.
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This is probably true, but mostly because Go-playing is a niche activity that lacks emotional valence to the public. It still would've been exciting to people who play Go.
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Oh, definitely. But would Google have spent billions of dollars to entertain people who play go?
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Hmm. No, but I think the relevant question is if they would have spent billions of dollars to impress people who did not play Go, but knew that Go was famously a less-solved strategy game than Chess.
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Famous to whom? A few thousand geeks, I’d guess. A plausible explanation for the PR push is that Google wants to attract the best engineers by seeming to be an exciting place to work. Maybe DeepMind is part of their recruiting budget, in which case, you would be right!
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Yeah I think you're majorly underestimating the degree to which the fact set "Go is a harder game than chess, Go players are still reliant on Human Intuition to an unusual degree for a game, nobody has solved Go by computer yet" had permeated STEMmish popular culture.
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I knew it long before I was interested in computers (and I'm still not all that interested in AI specifically)
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You are probably the sort of person Google wants to hire :)
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I'm not one in a thousand in this respect, though
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