Hi all, I was discussing the results with a colleague outside of the Game AI area the other day when he raised the question (which applies to nearly all sporting events, given the small sample size involved) of statistical significance - suggesting that on another week the result might have been 4-1 to Lee Sedol.
I pointed out that in games of skill there's much more to judge than just the final outcome of each game, but wondered if anyone had any better (or worse :) arguments - or had even engaged in the same type of conversation. With AlphaGo winning 4 games to 1, from a simplistic stats point of view (with the prior assumption of a fair coin toss) you'd not be able to claim much statistical significance, yet most (me included) believe that AlphaGo is a genuinely better Go player than Lee Sedol. From a stats viewpoint you can use this approach: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf (see section 3.2 on page 51) but given even priors it won't tell you much. Anyone know any good references for refuting this type of argument - the fact is of course that a game of Go is nothing like a coin toss. Games of skill tend to base their outcomes on the result of many (in the case of Go many hundreds of) individual actions. Best wishes, Simon _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
