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

101–110 of 133 posts

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#101

Post by throwaway999888 »

pgodzin wrote: post #64
throwaway999888 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. We have a come a long way already, and I would personally prefer that we do our best to not screw up what we already have . That includes global warming, unleashing Strong AI, and so on. It might suck to actually have to work, even as much as 40 hours a week or more in this day and age and with the productivity increases we've seen. But I don't think work itself is that horrible that I would bet my leisure o…

Your work may not be that horrible, but I'm sure there are a ton of people with either dangerous or incredibly monotonous jobs that could be automated would disagree with you.

I don't believe that you would need Strong AI to automate away dangerous parts of jobs. Or the monotonous parts.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#103

Post by argonaut »

sawwit wrote: post #94
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 a…

Yes. "Exploration" is a fairly basic aspect/concept in reinforcement learning, and any decent RL algorithm will try to address this issue.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#104

Post by mrdrozdov »

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…

There has been extensive research on modeling emotions. Here is an example of a professor, but there are others (http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~emilykmp/). Apple recently acquired a machine learning startup that mainly focused on emotion.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#105

Post by mathgeek »

chongli wrote: post #54
mathgeek wrote: post #30

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…

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.

> What context does an AI have for knowing what it even means to advance the game?

Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale.

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

The difference is that we don't have the ability to both redefine the jellyfish's goals and modify how it controls its interactions with the world.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#106

Post by ajuc »

drdeca wrote: post #89
purpled_haze wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

> Like, if its told to reproduce in the sandbox, it doesn't benefit by being on many computers?

It could benefit by comunicating with other copies by some hidden channels (temeprature/timing/sounds/noise on network/whatever) and cheating on tests and thus achieving better fitness.

BTW Stanisław Lem wrote a short story about this scenario in 1961 :) https://books.google.be/books?id=1DNVzphAHD0C&pg=PA39&hl=en#...

BTW2 Lem was awesome, I've read it when I was 15 and thought I understood it well enough. Only now I can appreciate some finer points like this stab at Haskell ;)

"These boxes contain perfect brains. Do you know wherein lies their perfection?"

"No." I admited.

"Their perfection lies in the fact that they serve no purpose, are absolutely, totaly useless - in short, they are Leibnitzian monads, which I have brought into being and clad in matter"

EDIT - this was not the story I had in mind, there was another one where simulated universes started to communicate but I can't remember which it was.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#107

Post by dkersten »

kbart wrote: post #100
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 w…

Any First Person Shooter - the AI can have perfect accuracy, perfect reflexes etc.

I haven't seen any decent AI yet for games that have more freedom of action

That's because decent AI is not strong AI - its lifelike AI. Not AI that can beat us, but AI that can outsmart us in a life-like manner. This means that Game AI must be less good that it can be, to keep the illusion of realism/humanity.

Ultimately the goals are different. The goals for academic/industrial AI are intelligent decision making. The goals for game AI is to be fun.

That doesn't mean that its always possible to make an AI that can beat a human player. Many strategy games, as you mentioned, are still too complex. I think "100% of games" doesn't mean "you can already write an AI that can win any game", but rather "there exist many games where the AI can win 100% of the time". Because the former is not true, as you demonstrate.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#108

Post by marmaduke »

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…

You have a few good points, none of which deny the argument's conclusion.

Biological systems do have a primary goal, that of maintaining their own organization and reproducing. From this derives common cost function for a video game, i.e. stay alive. Another, finding new information in the environment, also derives from the staying alive goal.

Degrees of freedom is a interesting example: from the movement sciences we know that while humans have in principle many degrees of freedom, when performing a task, the nervous system plays two roles: 1) highly constrain teh degrees of freedom and 2) act within the unconstrained subspace. The latter is what all the various ungeneralizable AIs are doing. The former, contraction of degrees of freedom, is the part which is difficult and constitutes a general AI, but it's essentially a learning problem, where the subspace of important degrees of freedom must be learned through interaction.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#109

Post by chongli »

mathgeek wrote: post #105
chongli wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> What context does an AI have for knowing what it even means to advance the game? Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale. > Imagine trying to teach a jellyfish how to play Skyrim. That's kind of where we're at right now. The difference is that we don't have the ability to both r…

Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale.

Then we're not really talking about AGI anymore, but a Skyrim-playing engine. Do you see the difference? A human being didn't evolve to play Skyrim, so building your AI with specific knowledge of Skyrim is cheating.

A proper AI should be able to learn to play Skyrim just as well as it could learn to play Chess or Super Mario Bros or any other video game we throw at it, including games not invented until after the AI is written. This is much, much harder than building something that can just play Skyrim.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#110

Post by animal531 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #65
monk_e_boy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

After all, smart humans are generally kind. ?? Smart humans drive cars which splat thousands of insects on their windshields. Smart humans buy clothes imported from third world child working sweatshops, and food from slaughtered pigs and cows and chickens farmed in unpleasant conditions. Smart humans flush their excrement into the rivers they take drinking water from, and the oceans they fish food from, the same plac…

I agree with true AI possibly being extremely non-human, but according to your examples that could be its most important feature. Us humans don't have the mental capacity to link child sweatshops to our limited world view, but an AI might, exactly because it's not limited by biology.

And even that also depends on upbringing. Our super intelligent spider who's been raised well (and associates with humans) should be friendlier than say a super intelligent dog who doesn't associate with humans.

Basically for me it comes down to how/if it associates with us. If so (or not), what does it stand to gain from exploiting us?

Post reply on HN