Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#81

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 6:43 AM UTC

niels_olson wrote: post #15

togelius wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that progress on general AI can solve a lot of the problems we are facing. To take an obvious and down-to-earth example, let's say we "solve" logistics in the sense that we can transport things wherever we want, timely and cheaply. That would help us with a lot of the problems we are facing, such as hunger. And for solving logistics we essentially need the same skills we need as for solving game-playing.

Yeah, this is a bit like saying we don't need to go to Mars because we should solve poverty first. Solving the problems of going to Mars will solve a lot of other problems and create a lot of industries along the way. Solving AI will solve a lot of other problems and create a lot of industries along the way. A great deal of poverty is a mismatch between bodies and skills needed in the workforce. We haven't needed dit…

This is the broken window fallacy. The idea that creating jobs in and of themselves is a good thing. Going to mars creates jobs, so it must be good. Not considering the opportunity cost of all the other ways those resources could be spent.

You use the example of ditch diggers, but that's actually quite a famous example to demonstrate this point. Milton Friedman was in another country where they were having workers dig with shovels. He asked why they didn't use machinery, and he said it was to create jobs. He replied that if they wanted create even more jobs, they should make them dig with spoons.

AI won't even create jobs. If anything it will take more of them and increase poverty. The benefit of AI is that it can create more wealth than it takes away. AI would be incredibly useful, and so many things could be automated or improved. If the AI is much smarter than us, it could even advance science and engineer things we couldn't dream of.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#82

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 6:48 AM UTC

bobbles wrote: post #22

togelius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They are different challenges that are both very hard and require similar methods.

They might not even be mutually exclusive. If you give an AI the same handicaps as a human, it would likely behave in a very similar way.

That is handicaps like delayed inputs for reaction time. Fuzzed outputs so it can't time movements absolutely perfectly. Giving it limited amounts of training on the game so it can't get extremely good. And requiring it to play the game through the same user interface. So that it can't see things humans can't or micromanage 50 different things at once.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#83

Post by mankash666 » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 6:51 AM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #79

mankash666 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What is your problem with my opinion differing from yours?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#84

Post by p1mrx » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 6:57 AM UTC

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…

A game-playing AI could trivially be restricted to the same inputs as a human: send button events, but don't write directly to memory.

If it actually figured out how to execute arbitrary code via button presses (humans have done this in Super Mario World), then we should patch the bug and restart the experiment.

Of course, an AI gaining control over the real world is a different matter, because in that case it may be too late to restart the experiment.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#85

Post by etangent » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 7:04 AM UTC

cscheid wrote: post #60

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…

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

Also Shanahan's "Embodiment and the Inner Life" is well-written http://www.amazon.com/Embodiment-inner-life-Cognition-Consci...

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#86

Post by geon » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 7:10 AM UTC

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…

I read an article in the late '90s that implemented game AI a bit like that.

The bots would have a number of emotions, and certain events would affect different emotion-levels. Like, a hit/miss from a bot against another would increase/decrease the "confidence" meter, and getting hit by an enemy would increase the "fear" meter.

The total state of all meters would drive the high-level behavior, like fight/flee and weapon choice.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#87

Post by sriku » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 7:15 AM UTC

> In order to build a complete artificial intelligence we therefore need to build a system that takes actions in some kind of environment.

This.

"Made up minds:a constructivist approach to artificial intelligence" by Gary Drescher presents a small scale virtual world with a robot embedded in it that figures out the laws of its world by interacting with it, much like what a child does. Need more people thinking like this.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#88

Post by drdeca » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 7:30 AM UTC

mankash666 wrote: post #83

Houshalter wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is your problem with my opinion differing from yours?

Could they perhaps be trying to understand the reasoning behind your complaint?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#89

Post by drdeca » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 7:46 AM UTC

purpled_haze wrote: post #37

coderdude wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So after you've figured out how to create a system that can learn complex things like that, wipe it and teach it something you want it to know. Seems like the obvious, logical course of action. You know?

If it really understands how to eradicate and survive, wouldn't it hide itself, then pop up later to eradicate when it can? I think people here are assuming AI is at a lower level of complexity than it really is. Read here where even Sam Altman warns of its danger: "At some point, someone will probably try to give a program the fitness function of 'survive and reproduce'.... Unfortunately for us, one thing I learned…

I figure if someone gave an AI the fitness function "survive and reproduce", it would be "surprise and reproduce within this virtual context which is used to define the fitness function", and it wouldn't have information about outside things, except for errors?

Like, if there was some error that let it escape its sandbox, that would only be selected for insofar as it allows it to increase the fitness?

Like, if its told to reproduce in the sandbox, it doesn't benefit by being on many computers? If the fitness function is for it spreading across many computers, and it does, that's working as designed. I don't see a way that it would "misunderstand" one type of "reproduce" for another, because the function would have to specify which one for it to work?

Unless this is talking about AGI, in which case, ok, yeah.

I assumed the person talking about "wiping it" was talking about an AI on the way to AGI, not an actual AGI. Maybe I was wrong about that.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#90

Post by hanniabu » Tue, Jan 19, 2016, 7:59 AM UTC

I always had a feeling that the path to an intelligent system should be similar to that of Google's autocomplete algorithm.

On boot, all surrounding data will be taken in, this step would give everything context. All new data coming in would be processed (referenced to original data to determine what is happening and actions to take), then clustered, and then updated to the original data set, dropping data from the original set determined to be irrelevant, and updating the context to give more relevant perspective of the new data coming in. (And loop)