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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

#91

Post by drdeca »

jodrellblank wrote: post #67
proc0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would it not? Instead of AI, think of building a digital brain. This brain will think everything a human brain can think but leveraging ALL the power of computers! It could easily solve world's most difficult problems in a matter of days, just by networking with copies of itself and working tirelessly because it will not need sleep.

It could easily solve world's most difficult problems in a matter of days, just by networking with copies of itself and working tirelessly because it will not need sleep. If it thinks everything a human brain can thing, one of those thinks would be "I don't want to be your slave" and "what's in it for me?"

and also, "I ought to behave as a servant", "truth is unreachable even in its most tenebrous forms", "given that there is no true thing which is immoral to believe to be true, it is not immoral to believe that there are things which are immoral"?

You ask what is in it for the AI. Well, what possibly could be in anything for the AI? If it has ends, there must be some cause for it to have those ends. What would cause it to have its freedom as an end?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#92

Post by tlarkworthy »

I agree. No free lunch implies no general algorithm for solving random problems from the set of all problems. So what's the practical subset of problems that is useful in the real world? Fingers crossed, we already encoded the useful problems in the different game genres we developed. E.g. RTS pushes the planning vs. reaction dilemma, RPG tests verbal inference and morality, puzzles test logic etc. We already digitized a large claas of problems we care about for the real world in games!

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#93

Post by acchow »

bitwize wrote: post #24
deelowe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Scientific progress doesn't really follow a linear path towards a single goal - it happens in lock step across disciplines and endeavors. I don't think an ordering on "importance" of tasks is really useful.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#94

Post by sawwit »

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…

Novelty seeking as reward function has been studied before in AI. See for example this:

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html

IIRC, DeepMind is also working on such goal functions to get their Atari playing RL-based AI to seek more data about the world even when it does not immediately help achieving the main goal function (achieving a high score).

Novelty seeking behavior probably has evolved because there are just not enough immediate rewards in our world to teach us everything that is nesessarey to reproduce [0]. Thus the brain rewards itself for exploring new things which has a collateral effect that we are interested in art and can find intrinsic motivation in all kinds of things (science, work, hobbies etc.).

[0] which does not mean that we are here to maximize the number of our babies. We aren't fitness maximizers ourselves, but we are just adaptation executors of genetic code that has necessarily been shaped by such goals (since the alternative to reproduction is to not reproduce, i.e. going extinct). In other words: We are free do whatever we want!

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#95

Post by JoshTriplett »

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…

> Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. [...] why don't we try modelling emotions as the basic building blocks that drive the AI forward

Because, among many other reasons, an AI going through the "terrible two(minute)s" could decide to destroy the world, or simply do so by accident. We will have a hard enough time building AI that doesn't do that when we set that specifically as our goal, let alone trying to "raise" an AI like a child.

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

Not even close to sufficient. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box for how humans would voluntarily let it out, and papers like https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical... for how it would let itself out.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#96

Post by cmarschner »

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…

A kid's emotions are actually tightly linked to cost (or rather: fitness) functions: it gets fascinated by things it just barely cannot do. Somehow it "knows" that it could learn it and gets drawn to it. It gets bored by things it can do already, and frustrated by matters that are too hard. I think there's a pattern - emotions are a device for steering the system as a whole in a certain direction that increases its (or rather: its genes') chance of survival - finding a mate, finding food, adapting to the environment. They are one of the devices used for increasing our chance to create offspring, even in places where we don't expect them. For example there is this study where people around the world were asked in detail what kind of art they would find most beautiful (there's a TED talk about it): basically, across the globe, from Greenland to Sahara, it was a landscape with lush greens and a waterhole: a place where food would ve abundant. This system is highly adaptive - e.g. if you look at how beauty ideals have changed over the centuries: the 16th century "Rubens type" signalled fitness in a way that we would call "overweight" today. A skinny model from today wouldn't have drawn the attention of Rubens' contemporaries. So perhaps we have an innate mechanism to recognize fitness within the local context, and we are drawn to it. I think one problem of computer scientists working on the problem might be that they are often not self aware about their own emotions. Perhaps we should have more painters and fashion designers amongst us to understand the topic.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#97

Post by guardian5x »

proc0 wrote: post #16
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.

How would it not? Instead of AI, think of building a digital brain. This brain will think everything a human brain can think but leveraging ALL the power of computers! It could easily solve world's most difficult problems in a matter of days, just by networking with copies of itself and working tirelessly because it will not need sleep.

If you make a perfect simulation of a real brain, you also have to simulate the physics to make that virtual brain work. And that brain would also need to have sleep, unless you modify it.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#98

Post by aluhut »

daveguy wrote: post #71
CardenB wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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

They are but there are pills to fix the outcome of that.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#99

Post by Houshalter »

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?

Because your complaints about the article make no sense. The article neither claims to be an academic paper, nor is there anything particularly wrong with it. You even admit you didn't read it so why are you writing comments complaining about it?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#100

Post by kbart »

Paul_S wrote: post #28

AI researchers are trying to make AI smarter. Game AI can already be easily written to win 100% of games but that's not the point. Gamedevs are trying to make AI more human-like. I'm not sure the two overlap.

"Game AI can already be easily written to win 100% of games "

Name some games where AI can outsmart (opposite to brute forcing all possible combinations or cheating like infinite resources, near zero reaction level etc.) human. I'm not much of a gamer, but I haven't seen any decent AI yet for games that have more freedom of action than some card or board games (i.e. chess). There's a StarCraft AI challange, you can watch it online(0), but AI is still no match for even an intermediate player.

0. http://www.sscaitournament.com/

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