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.
I wonder how many people mistakenly bought it as a self-help book :)
It looks very interesting. What do you feel are the main take-aways with regard to reinforcement learning?
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…
> We aren't fitness maximizers ourselves, but we are just adaptation executors of genetic code that has necessarily been shaped by such goals
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 (…
To me this model feels a bit too simplistic. If you only look at how children learn their abilities, then yes, absolutely. Where it breaks down for me is in the interaction with play partners. The joy he seems to get for playing together doesn't seem to be fully explainable through pure evolutionary steering / fitness functions, but it's hard to put my finger on what's missing in the picture. An example is his joyful giggling when I'm doing something unexpected. You can see the tug of war between fearfulness and joyfulness - at the beginning when they become sensitive to playful behavior it makes them afraid, but more and more this is replaced with pure joy, also showing a trust relationship. So to me it seems the curiosity goes beyond just what the child can achieve him/herself in the near future, it's also a curiosity and joy of observing the world, and more importantly, what the caregivers are doing. Everything new is exciting, and much of it doesn't seem to be something that could have been selected for directly. So there seems to be some emergent behavior that comes from the interaction of evolved chemistry/signaling, and the actual cognitive functions.
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 specific…
There are multiple factions when it comes to AI, and both positions don't seem to be disprovable to me, i.e. whether AI will safe us or be our doom. On the opposite spectrum I'd put David Deutsch[1]. My position is that if such a singularity is possible, we probably can't avoid it, but it's probably possible to nugde it into a good direction by being careful during research. According to Deutsch, the problem of keeping AI on a good track is the same as keeping humans on a good track, since modelling ourselves is the only way we know how to build a general intelligence. So if we can succeed in building a stable society (which we sort of have at least locally), then we might also succeed in building a general AI that is acting in our interests.
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…
Moreover, these were designed by humans with very explicit successes, losses and easily distinguishable outcomes.
This is only true if you assume a TON of contextual knowledge of biology, human culture, civilization, warfare, etc. Why should an AI have any of that?
Look even at an extremely simple game such as tick-tack-toe (or noughts and crosses). How should an AI learn to play this game? Assume it has been given no knowledge of the game beforehand, like a human child shown the game for the first time. How should the AI know who wins and who loses the game? How should it know that the objective is to win at all? The idea that winning is desirable seems to be hard-wired into human beings; why should that be the case for an AI?
"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…
In a FPS, AI can have perfect reflexes and accuracy because it's playing in a different playing field than the player. If the AI had to recognize images and operate a mouse, it wouldn't be remotely as good. Although I can imagine that eventually, AI can get good at that too.
But the real test of AI is not in speed and accuracy; it's in planning, outsmarting, figuring out the right tactics and strategy. For a game that's mostly about speed and reflexes, or one that's about calculating through a limited number of options, AI can be great. But even the best AI still sucks at complex strategy games with uncertainty and incomplete information.
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?
I'm entitled to my opinion just like you're entitled to yours, and my opinion happens to be negative, the reason for which is spelt out clearly in my opening salvo.
I'm stunned that you think your point of view is somehow the only one. Why are you quelling criticism?
What is your problem with my opinion differing from yours?
Could they perhaps be trying to understand the reasoning behind your complaint?
But my reasoning is spelt out clearly in my first post- I find the opening statement of the article to be a frivolous hyperbole in a world facing cancer, global warming, hunger, poverty, antibiotic resistant infections....
A lot of those sorts of problems would disappear if you had smarter than human AI running the government. The people vote on the rules, the AI plans and executes the rules. No more corruption.
But what about disk corruption?
The AI would invent a non-corruptible disk, obviously.
On a related note, I think an official driving test simulation for all the self-driving algorithms, perhaps sponsored by the government, would be really beneficial.