Financial Times: “Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI”

Kellin Pelrine, an American player who is one level below the top amateur ranking, beat the machine by taking advantage of a previously unknown flaw that had been identified by another computer. But the head-to-head confrontation in which he won 14 of 15 games was undertaken without direct computer support.

The triumph, which has not previously been reported, highlighted a weakness in the best Go computer programs that is shared by most of today’s widely used AI systems, including the ChatGPT chatbot created by San Francisco-based OpenAI.

The tactics that put a human back on top on the Go board were suggested by a computer program that had probed the AI systems looking for weaknesses. The suggested plan was then ruthlessly delivered by Pelrine.

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The discovery of a weakness in some of the most advanced Go-playing machines points to a fundamental flaw in the deep learning systems that underpin today’s most advanced AI, said Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The systems can “understand” only specific situations they have been exposed to in the past and are unable to generalise in a way that humans find easy, he added.

It shows once again we’ve been far too hasty to ascribe superhuman levels of intelligence to machines, Russell said.

Richard Waters

While this unexpected human victory wasn’t against AlphaGo, DeepMind’s neural network that made headlines in 2016, it serves to underline nonetheless that deep learning systems are far from infallible and deeply vulnerable when confronted with circumstances that were missing or underrepresented in the training data. One of the reasons it’s fine to deploy AI in low-stakes scenarios, such as videogames, but dangerous and unpredictable to let deep learning algorithms drive cars.

Kellin Pelrine won 14 of 15 games against one of the top Go-playing systems in January FT montage

I find it ironic though that the weaknesses were spotted by… another algorithm! Feels like we’re getting closer to a common science-fiction trope, of various AI competing and fighting each-other, with humans barely aware of their consequential clashes.