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Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

togelius.blogspot.com

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Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#21

Post by monk_e_boy »

deelowe wrote: post #3
bitwize wrote: post #2

I don't think building an AI is the most important task on our plate. We still have those disease, hunger, poverty, and war problems to contend with. If building an AI helps us solve those, then sure, let's build the AI. But I don't think strong AI is necessary to gain traction on the problems that confront the sapient beings we already have around.

uggh. As if all the AI programmers out there would instantly join doctors without borders if they decided to stop working tomorrow. These sorts of arguments make no sense to me.

A lot of those sorts of problems would disappear if you had smarter than human AI running the government. The people vote on the rules, the AI plans and executes the rules. No more corruption.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#22

Post by bobbles »

togelius wrote: post #11
purpled_haze wrote: post #8

> Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence And here's why they aren't: First-person Shooters. Why give AI something that's a goal that involves killing things that look like humans or animals for points? That's a recipe for disaster. Breakout's not much better either. How often do you need to break a wall to smithereens with a ball? Never.

It's hard to create believable AI in a first-person shooter. See: http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?botprize2012 It's actually really hard to create well-performing AI in a first person shooter, unless you give it explicit access to the internal state of the game. See: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=612949...

I guess there's a pretty big difference between making AI that is 'perfect' at the game vs AI that is believable / indistinguishable from a human.

I mean do we want all AI endeavors to be towards believe-ability or being best at the job they're designed for?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#23

Post by purpled_haze »

coderdude wrote: post #13
purpled_haze wrote: post #8

> Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence And here's why they aren't: First-person Shooters. Why give AI something that's a goal that involves killing things that look like humans or animals for points? That's a recipe for disaster. Breakout's not much better either. How often do you need to break a wall to smithereens with a ball? Never.

FPS games are a great playground for learning, regardless of the killing. If you can teach an AI to hunt, kill, and avoid being killed, then you've got something interesting on your hands. Once you have the system in place that can learn how to do those things, you don't have to keep it training on a violent game. You can switch it to Minecraft. We don't care if AI kills zombies.

> If you can teach an AI to hunt, kill, and avoid being killed...

then you've taught an AI to be a predator.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#24

Post by bitwize »

deelowe wrote: post #3
bitwize wrote: post #2

I don't think building an AI is the most important task on our plate. We still have those disease, hunger, poverty, and war problems to contend with. If building an AI helps us solve those, then sure, let's build the AI. But I don't think strong AI is necessary to gain traction on the problems that confront the sapient beings we already have around.

uggh. As if all the AI programmers out there would instantly join doctors without borders if they decided to stop working tomorrow. These sorts of arguments make no sense to me.

Er, "not the most important" is not the same as "not worthwhile" or "not really freaking cool". But when you open an essay with "the most important task for us humans to achieve is..." you're imposing an order on tasks and a ranking for your stated task at the top of that order. I'm challenging the ranking that puts building strong AI at the top.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#25

Post by purpled_haze »

ketralnis wrote: post #10
purpled_haze wrote: post #8

> Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence And here's why they aren't: First-person Shooters. Why give AI something that's a goal that involves killing things that look like humans or animals for points? That's a recipe for disaster. Breakout's not much better either. How often do you need to break a wall to smithereens with a ball? Never.

Care to explain?

Why would you teach an AI how to kill humans and animals?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#26

Post by monk_e_boy »

jonmrodriguez wrote: post #6
bitwize wrote: post #2

I don't think building an AI is the most important task on our plate. We still have those disease, hunger, poverty, and war problems to contend with. If building an AI helps us solve those, then sure, let's build the AI. But I don't think strong AI is necessary to gain traction on the problems that confront the sapient beings we already have around.

Along similar lines, since AI is considered to be potentially dangerous, by figures from Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking, I would rather our civilization never open this pandora's box. We can solve Earth's problems and even spread to the stars without AI. We can invent fusion reactors and thus nearly free energy without AI. We can engineer biological immortality into our very genes without AI. Why risk playing with a lo…

But strong AI may figure out how to save us.

One argument says AI may become smarter than us and decide to kill us all, either on purpose or by accident.

But why not consider that the AI may be kind, it may help us and give us things. After all, smart humans are generally kind. Most of us wouldn't think to kill a dolphin, why would an AI think to kill a human or a dolphin?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#27

Post by [deleted] »

pgodzin wrote: post #4

Really interesting to think about the skills necessary just to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully. NLP to understand dialogue and actions that need to be taken based on what NPC's/quests/item descriptions say, strategies for several different enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, exploring the open world in a logical order. When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defi…

[deleted]

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#29

Post by fitzwatermellow »

Great summary of current state of the art with links to interesting projects: GVG-AI, VGDL...

Videos games are also essential for AI pedagogy. Creating Pac-Man agents in Stanford's AI class is a great example. Most players can barely get a "strawberry" but to see a trained agent mimicking human expert level play is eye-opening.

Quick reminder: Global Game Jam 2016 starts Jan. 29 and NYU is hosting its annual jam!

http://gamecenter.nyu.edu/event/global-game-jam-2016/

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#30

Post by mathgeek »

pgodzin wrote: post #4

Really interesting to think about the skills necessary just to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully. NLP to understand dialogue and actions that need to be taken based on what NPC's/quests/item descriptions say, strategies for several different enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, exploring the open world in a logical order. When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defi…

> When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defined problem, it's hard to buy into the real-world fears of AI.

My belief is that one day, in the not too distant future, we'll be saying that it's hard to believe we ever considered such things difficult for AI.

Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim.

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