Nobody said “we got AI to play Go” when AI Go engines were only amateur dan strength, even though they could have equally well said “we got AI to play Go at a superhuman level but it’s just very slow”.
I understand this as saying “If you take an AI Go engine from the pre-AlphaGo era, it was pretty bad in real time. But if you set the search depth to an extremely high value, it would be superhuman, it just might take a bajillion years per move. For that matter, in 1950, people had computers, and people knew how to do naive exhaustive tree search, so they could already make an algorithm that was superhuman at Go, it’s just that it would take like a googol years per move and require galactic-scale memory banks etc.”
Is that what you were trying to say? If not, can you rephrase?
Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say, though I think in actual practice the numbers you need would have been much smaller for the Go AIs I’m talking about than they would be for the naive tree search approach.
I understand this as saying “If you take an AI Go engine from the pre-AlphaGo era, it was pretty bad in real time. But if you set the search depth to an extremely high value, it would be superhuman, it just might take a bajillion years per move. For that matter, in 1950, people had computers, and people knew how to do naive exhaustive tree search, so they could already make an algorithm that was superhuman at Go, it’s just that it would take like a googol years per move and require galactic-scale memory banks etc.”
Is that what you were trying to say? If not, can you rephrase?
And if humans spent a googol years planning their moves, those moves would still be better because their search scales better.
Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say, though I think in actual practice the numbers you need would have been much smaller for the Go AIs I’m talking about than they would be for the naive tree search approach.