Machine Learning, AI Chess Supercomputers, and The Future of The Retail Investor

r/https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2017/12/deep-mind-alpha-zeros-immortal-zugzwang-game-stockfish/

Even if you don't play chess, you can still appreciate the significance of this chess game between Googles new machine learning AI program, known as "AlphaZero", and Stockfish, which up until this point, was the strongest chess computer in the world. Stockfish is a classical computer, where millions of games are programmed into the software. It weights certain positions by a point system, and calculates via a brute force method, going through 100's of millions of positions, then picking the right one. As a chess player myself, playing Stockfish is futile, as even the most minute positional mistake will lead to an outright frontal assault on your king, or a loss of a piece 10 moves later. You'd think Stockfish would at least put up a fight, but what resulted shocked the chess and computer world. Not only did AlphaZero win decisively, but out of 100 games, Stockfish couldn't even win once. It was like watching a novice chess player playing a grandmaster, with AlphaZero making ridiculous sacrifices for seemingly dubious positional advantages, where 20 moves down the road, AlphaZero would end up with the better position. It was like Skynet on a chessboard. To make a sacrifice against a chess computer, even one, is a feat in it's own right, but it seemed like every other move was a ridiculously long line of 100's of different lines branching into 100's more. Almost every move included some kind of sacrifice.

You can almost feel like there is a human like intuitive discernment happening, like there is a person, and not just some robot, moving the pieces. It doesn't need to calculate as many positions like Stockfish because it sees a bigger picture that Stockfish is incapable of understanding. AlphaZero has a cohesion of thought that results in original insight, which you see in this game. It's like AlphaZero has a spacial understanding of the game that seems almost human. At times, it even seemed like AlphaZero was toying with Stockfish.

I believe this spacial understanding, and intuitive calculation, rather than brute force tallying, is the future of stock algorithms. Before these games, Google's AlphaGo beat the strongest Go player in the world, shocking the Go community. At the time, many professional Go players thought it was impossible to create a program that could beat a human due to Go's intuitive requirements, something up until then at least, was believed to be unique to humans. A few years ago, facebook had to shutdown it's AI algo because it created it's own language and was communicating with itself. Machine learning is already inventing new ways of doing things, without needing any human guidance. Is this really surprising though? Remember the movie Demolition Man with Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone. The story was set in 2032, which back then was 40 years in the future, where people had flying cars and used seashell to wipe their ass. Well, it's 2018 now, almost 2019. Will this technology make the retail trader obsolete? Hopefully not, but as a long time chess player, who has watched hundreds of engines play, something inside me fears this may be the case

Submitted August 15, 2018 at 08:10PM by stockenthusiast https://ift.tt/2nEMXGz