The Creativity Code. Marcus du Sautoy
so, although chess has been useful to help explain some aspects of mathematics, the game of Go has always been held up as far closer in spirit to the way mathematicians actually go about their business. That’s why mathematicians weren’t too worried when Deep Blue beat the best humans could offer at chess. The real challenge was the game of Go. For decades people have been claiming that the game of Go can never be played by a computer. Like all good absolutes, it invited creative coders to test that proposition. But even a junior player appeared to be able to outplay even the most complex algorithms. And so mathematicians happily hid behind the cover that Go was providing them. If a computer couldn’t play Go then there was no chance it could play the even subtler and more ancient game of mathematics.
But just as the Great Wall of China was eventually breached, my defensive wall has just crumbled in spectacular fashion.
Game Boy extraordinaire
At the beginning of 2016 it was announced that a program had been created to play Go that its developers were confident could hold its own against the best humans had to offer. Go players around the world were extremely sceptical, given the failure of past efforts. So the company that developed the program offered a challenge. It set up a public contest with a huge prize and invited one of the world’s leading Go players to take up the challenge. An international champion, Lee Sedol from Korea, stepped forward. The competition would be played over five games with the winner taking home a prize of one million dollars. The name of Sedol’s challenger: AlphaGo.
AlphaGo is the brainchild of Demis Hassabis. Hassabis was born in London in 1976 to a Greek Cypriot father and a mother from Singapore. Both parents are teachers and what Hassabis describes as bohemian technophobes. His sister and brother went the creative route, one becoming a composer, the other choosing creative writing. So Hassabis isn’t quite sure where his geeky scientific side came from. But as a kid Hassabis was someone who quickly marked himself out as gifted and talented, especially when it came to playing games. His abilities at chess were such that at eleven he was the second-highest-ranked child of his age in the world.
But then at an international match in Liechtenstein that year Hassabis had an epiphany: what on earth were they all doing? The hall was full of so many great minds exploring the logical intricacies of this great game. And yet Hassabis suddenly recognised the total futility of such a project. In a radio interview on the BBC he admitted thinking at the time: ‘We were wasting our minds. What if we used that brain power for something more useful like solving cancer?’
His parents were pretty shocked when after the tournament (which he narrowly lost after battling for ten hours with the adult Dutch world champion) he announced that he was giving up chess competitions. Everyone had thought this was going to be his life. But those years playing chess weren’t wasted. A few years earlier he’d used the £200 prize money he’d won for beating a US opponent, Alex Chang, to buy his first computer: a ZX Spectrum. That computer sparked his obsession with getting machines to do the thinking for him.
Hassabis soon graduated on to a Commodore Amiga, which could be programmed to play the games he enjoyed. Chess was still too complicated, but he managed to program the Commodore to play Othello, a game that looks rather similar to Go with black and white stones that get flipped when they are trapped between stones of the opposite colour. It’s not a game that merits grandmasters, so he tried his program out on his younger brother. It beat him every time.
This was classic ‘if …, then …’ programming: he needed to code in by hand the response to each of his opponent’s moves. It was: ‘If your opponent plays that move, then reply with this move.’ The creativity all came from Hassabis and his ability to see what the right responses were to win the game. It still felt a bit like magic though. Code up the right spell and then, rather like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the Commodore would go through the work of winning the game.
Hassabis raced through school, culminating with an offer from Cambridge to study computer science at the age of sixteen. He’d set his heart on Cambridge after seeing Jeff Goldblum in the film The Race for the Double Helix. ‘I thought, is this what goes on at Cambridge? You go there and you invent DNA in the pub? Wow.’
Cambridge wouldn’t let him start his degree at the age of sixteen, so he had to defer for a year. To fill his time he won a place working for a game developer after having come second in a competition run by Amiga Power magazine. While he was there, he created his own game, Theme Park, where players had to build and run their own theme park. The game was hugely successful, selling several million copies and winning a Golden Joystick award. With enough funds to finance his time at university, Hassabis set off for Cambridge.
His course introduced him to the greats of the AI revolution: Alan Turing and his test for intelligence, Arthur Samuel and his program to play draughts, John McCarthy, who coined the term artificial intelligence, Frank Rosenblatt and his first experiments with neural networks. These were the shoulders on which Hassabis aspired to stand. It was while sitting in his lectures at Cambridge that he heard his professor repeating the mantra that a computer could never play Go because of the game’s creative and intuitive characteristics. This was like a red rag to the young Hassabis. He left Cambridge determined to prove his professor wrong.
His idea was that rather than trying to write a program himself that could play Go, he would write a meta-program that would be responsible for writing the program that would play Go. It sounded a crazy idea, but the point was that the meta-program would be created so that as the Go-playing program played more and more games it would learn from its mistakes.
Hassabis had learned about a similar idea implemented by the artificial-intelligence researcher Donald Michie in the 1960s. Michie had written an algorithm called ‘MENACE’ that learned from scratch the best strategy to play noughts and crosses. (MENACE stood for Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine.) To demonstrate the algorithm, Michie had rigged up 304 matchboxes representing all the possible layouts of noughts and crosses encountered while playing. Each matchbox was filled with different-coloured balls to represent possible moves. Balls were removed or added to the boxes to punish losses or reward wins. As the algorithm played more and more games, the reassignment of the balls eventually led to an almost perfect strategy for playing. It was this idea of learning from your mistakes that Hassabis wanted to use to train an algorithm to play Go.
Hassabis had a good model to base his strategy on. A newborn baby does not have a brain that is pre-programmed to cope with making its way through life. It is programmed instead to learn as it interacts with its environment.
If Hassabis was going to tap into the way the brain learned to solve problems, then knowing how the brain works was clearly going to help in his dream of creating a program to play Go. So he decided to do a PhD in neuroscience at University College London. It was during coffee breaks from lab work that Hassabis started discussing with a neuroscientist, Shane Legg, his plans to create a company to try out his ideas. It shows the low status of AI even a decade ago that they never admitted to their professors their dream to dedicate their lives to AI. But they felt they were on to something big, so in September 2010 the two scientists decided to create a company with Mustafa Suleyman, a friend of Hassabis from childhood. DeepMind was incorporated.
The company needed money but initially Hassabis just couldn’t raise any capital. Pitching on a platform that they were going to play games and solve intelligence did not sound serious to most investors. A few, however, did see the vision. Among those who put money in right at the outset were Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel had never invested outside Silicon Valley and tried to persuade Hassabis to relocate to the West Coast. A born-and-bred Londoner, Hassabis held his ground, insisting that there was more untapped talent in London that could be exploited. Hassabis remembers a crazy conversation he had with Thiel’s lawyer. ‘Does London have law on IP?’ she asked innocently. ‘I think they thought we were coming from Timbuctoo!’ The founders had to give up a huge amount of stock to the investors, but they had their money to start trying to crack AI.
The challenge of creating a machine that could learn to play Go still felt like a distant dream. They set their sights at first on a seemingly less cerebral goal: playing 1980s Atari games. Atari is probably responsible for