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Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

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Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 advan…

> 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. And if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare and if you play the powerball enoug…

> What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins.

The average human is terrible at playing Skyrim, Pac-Man, and video games in general. Someone who has never even looked at a computer will have a hard time playing Skyrim or any other video game without many hours of practice. And, most video games draw upon stuff that humans already know, like moving around in a physical world, and a concept of self, which gives them a huge advantage over AI right from the start.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. And if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare and if you play the powerball enoug…

> What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins. The average human is terrible at playing Skyrim, Pac-Man, and video games in general. Someone who has never even looked at a computer will have a hard time playing Skyrim or any other video game without many hours of practice. And, most video g…

You could even say that one of humans' super powers is forgetting just how much practice went into learning something.

I've been walking for 28 years and I still trip sometimes. That's almost 31,000 hours of practice, if we assume an average of just 3 hours of basic movement per day. Even going to the bathroom counts.

And when it comes to image/object recognition, I've had 163,000+ hours of practice. And I still see stuff I don't recognize plenty of times. Hell, optical illusions still fuck me up.

Now just imagine what an AI could do with that much practice/data.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#53
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…

It's way more complex even than that. That all takes for granted that an AI would even know what an object is, let alone other life-forms (in game). An AI that starts from scratch doesn't get access to the vast wealth of human life experience as a baseline context for understanding a game. Without all that, what is it working with? A whole lot of nonsensical visual and audio data.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#54
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 advan…

one that advances the game successfully

What context does an AI have for knowing what it even means to advance the game? A game like Skyrim carries a HUGE baseline assumption that the player is familiar with what it's like to be a human being, living in a human culture rich with history and conflict.

Imagine trying to teach a jellyfish how to play Skyrim. That's kind of where we're at right now.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#55
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.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an AI problem.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#56
This is a cute argument, but I think it falls into a trap of following its own thinking.

Video games are explicitly designed to test and fit within our bounds of conscious control and processing; particularly the retro games, but essentially all games in general have a very limited input control space (a couple keys or joysticks) and usually very rigorously defined action values. Moreover, these were designed by humans with very explicit successes, losses and easily distinguishable outcomes.

None of these descriptions fit the kind of control that an 'intelligent' system needs to handle. Biological systems do not have predefined goal values, very incomplete sensory information and most importantly control spaces that are absolutely enormous compared to anything considered in a video game. At any point in time the human body has ~40 degrees of freedom it is actively controlling - compared to ~5 in a serious video game.

I do not doubt that pattern recognition and machine learning techniques can be improved through these kind of competitions. But the problem is in conflating better pattern recognition with general intelligence; implying or assuming any sort of cost, value or goal function in the controlling algorithm hides much of our ignorance about our 'intelligent' behavior.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#57

"The most important thing for humanity to do right now is to invent true artificial intelligence" Maybe the article makes some valid scientific points, but I simply cannot go past this unscientific opening claim to a purportedly scientific article. Not just me, no peer-review journal will accept such frivolity. Passing on the article and hoping for better scientific writing in the future!

This is someone's blog, not a peer-review journal. And sure, that someone is a researcher and thus you might want to hold them to a peer-reviewed journal standard in their blog posts.

Personally, I appreciate the amount of time that clearly went into writing this blog post and the information shared therein. Most of what's shared on Hacker News doesn't go into the depth of this article.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#58
post #57

"The most important thing for humanity to do right now is to invent true artificial intelligence" Maybe the article makes some valid scientific points, but I simply cannot go past this unscientific opening claim to a purportedly scientific article. Not just me, no peer-review journal will accept such frivolity. Passing on the article and hoping for better scientific writing in the future!

This is someone's blog, not a peer-review journal. And sure, that someone is a researcher and thus you might want to hold them to a peer-reviewed journal standard in their blog posts. Personally, I appreciate the amount of time that clearly went into writing this blog post and the information shared therein. Most of what's shared on Hacker News doesn't go into the depth of this article.

In a world dominated by hyperboles, opinions, click bait and general Fox newsification, I do realize that demanding unbiased facts can be an alien concept, but generally expected the hacker news community to embrace this thinking. I've been repeatedly surprised by down voting for not being an echo chamber - HN doesn't like dissidents.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#59
Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. Seeing my son getting excited about his 'world state changing' gave me an idea. What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? Human, and to some extent, animal intelligence is the only intelligence we know about. If that's what we want to emulate, why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building blocks that drive the AI forward? Until now, the way I understand neuronal nets, we have basically modelled the neurons and gave them something to do. My hunch is that brain chemistry is what's driving us actually forward, so what if we model that as well? Instead of seratonin, endorphin etc. we could also look at it at a higher level, akin to Pixar's Inside Out - joy, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, and I would add boredom.

Let's stay with video games for a bit. What if we look at joy as 'seeing the world change', graded by the degree of indirection from our inputs (the longer it cascades, the more joy it gets). Maybe let it have preference for certain color tones and sounds, because that's also how games give us hints about whether what we do is good or not. Boredom is what sets us on a timer - too many repetitions of the same thing and the AI gets bored. Fear and disgust is something that comes out of evolutionary processes, so it might be best to add a GA in there that couples success with some fear like emotion. Anger, well, maybe wait with that ;-).

Edit: Oh, and for the love of god, please airgap the thing at all times...

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#60

Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. Seeing my son getting excited about his 'world state changing' gave me an idea. What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? Human, and to some extent, animal intelligence is the only intelligence we know about. If that's what we want to emulate, why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building…

You'll have a lot of fun looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
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