Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

togelius.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 133 posts

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#71

Post by daveguy »

CardenB wrote: post #20
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…

I think the main argument (regarding fears of AI) is that, by the time you've solved the aforementioned problems, it's too late. AI can learn so quickly that we won't be able to anticipate it properly.

There will be a wide gradient of AIs between "dumb as worm" and "play skyrim" just like there will be a gradient between "play skyrim" and "omg super ai". Exponential from "dumb as a worm" is "dumb as two worms working together" and we haven't even gotten to "dumb as a worm" level yet.

People should be a lot more concerned with whether or not their job rises to the level of "dumb as a worm".

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#72

Post by soared »

jodrellblank wrote: post #62
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…

Those aren't the skills necessary to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully, those are the skills necessary for a human to play, for fun, without cheating. Another way to play "successfully" is to edit memory locations and spoof protocol packets, set inventory=full, score=MAX_SCORE and level position= $LAST_LEVEL and declare yourself the winner. Unless and until we can encode 'play by our rules, up…

I understand you're saying that an AI wouldn't limit itself to following the rules (even if arbitrary), but then it isn't really "playing." So yeah, I agree that the fear is an AI won't "play" the game of life, because it might not abide by our seemingly arbitrary rules.

What about a rule that says "follow the rules."

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#73

Post by kayoone »

venachescu wrote: post #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 huma…

That might be true, but as long as we are still quite a bit away from the point where an advanced AI could successfully play a complex open world game like Skyrim, GTA5 or the Witcher, it is a good next step to work on.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#74

Post by mankash666 »

dangoor wrote: post #66
mankash666 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can someone express their opinions then, if not on their own blogs?

Anywhere - free speech IS non negotiable, free speech IS essential. However, intelligent speech is what I expect to gain traction on HN. There's plenty of free and inaccurate speech on the internet. I mistakenly expected a democratic, community curated forum to up vote accurate speech. Alas

BTW- it's okay for a stranger on the internet to disagree with one's blog/opinion. Clearly, for every stickler like me, there are hundreds who actually enjoy the baroque writing and opinions. I'm just likely not the target audience - which is just fine by the author and a cursory glancer such as I.

But you see, my speech is drowned out in a sea of upvotes that completely disagree with the me, somehow lending more credence to the author. It's like a town hall meeting where the crowd boos someone because of differing popular opinion - they only want to hear what they already think.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#75

Post by [deleted] »

dangoor wrote: post #66
mankash666 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can someone express their opinions then, if not on their own blogs?

[deleted]

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#76

Post by mankash666 »

dangoor wrote: post #66
mankash666 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where can someone express their opinions then, if not on their own blogs?

Also, please note that the author is a professor at NYU. I'm certain of his higher intellect than mine, humbly noting.

However, he's no stranger to peer review, both as an author and reviewer. The opening statement of this post just wouldn't make it past his own editorial standards - a point worth noting.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#77

Post by Houshalter »

I don't disagree that video games are a very useful benchmark to evaluate intelligence. But I don't think AGI will evolve from video games. I think that language understanding is the path to AGI.

Language is quite complex and can't easily be beaten by hard coded algorithms or simple statistics. You can do some tasks with those things, but others they will fail entirely. The closer you get to passing a true turing test, the harder the problem becomes. It certainly requires human intelligence, and most of our intelligence is deeply rooted in language.

He mentioned games like Skyrim and Civilization as being end goals. But even a human that doesn't speak English wouldn't be able to play those games. Let alone an alien that knew nothing about our world, or even our universe.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#78

Post by baddox »

rm999 wrote: post #68
m_mueller wrote: post #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…

>What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? ... why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building blocks that drive the AI forward? There are theories that intelligence comes about from relatively simple processes that generate complex structures. If we can model these simple processes and throw increasing amounts of computing power at it, perhaps we can actually get to somet…

It's an interesting thought, but I have trouble thinking about intelligence as a consequence of emotions rather than the other way around. I've always thought of emotions like "sadness" and "love" as the words we use to describe brain states that are the obvious result of our having intelligence.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#79

Post by Houshalter »

mankash666 wrote: post #74
dangoor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can someone express their opinions then, if not on their own blogs?

Anywhere - free speech IS non negotiable, free speech IS essential. However, intelligent speech is what I expect to gain traction on HN. There's plenty of free and inaccurate speech on the internet. I mistakenly expected a democratic, community curated forum to up vote accurate speech. Alas BTW- it's okay for a stranger on the internet to disagree with one's blog/opinion. Clearly, for every stickler like me, there ar…

What is your problem? What is so unintelligent about the article? How is it biased or inaccurate?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#80

Post by nutschig »

m_mueller wrote: post #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…

Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman have a great book out on measuring novelty, and using it to search large parameter spaces for interesting behaviors.

http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/noveltysearch/userspage/ http://www.amazon.com/Why-Greatness-Cannot-Planned-Objective...

I'm a big fan, and would love to talk about this anytime.

Post reply on HN