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Playing Atari with Six Neurons

arxiv.org

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Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#21

Post by kabdib »

kabdib wrote: post #10

... and that's three more than the average Atari marketing exec had back then. No wonder they had trouble understanding the game industry :-)

Okay, a true story, my second disappointing interaction with Atari marketing.

One fine day my boss came to me and said that he had an ask from Atari Marketing (in the Home Computer arm of the company).

The marketing drone came to my office (yes, we had offices in those days). "My idea is to pre-copyright all possible 8x8 bitmaps so that people can't use them without our permission. Can you print them out for me so we can submit them to the copyright office?" He actually meant all possible 8x8 bitmaps containing five colors, with colors chosen from an 7 or 8 bit space (I forget which).

I told him the story of the guy who supposedly invented chess, and was offered a choice of reward by his king. The fellow simply asked, "Just give me one grain of rice for the first square, two grains of rice for the second, four for the third, and so on." Most of you know how this ends, it's grade school math.

I explained to the marketing guy that the printout would probably outweigh the planet, maybe the solar system, maybe the galaxy. He went away, a little disgusted with those pesky engineers. (I don't know if he was the same oxygen waster who wanted me to write a 16K cartridge in just a couple of weeks, but he certainly was in the same department).

So I'm still sticking with three brain cells, despite all the downvotes :-)

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#22

Post by arijun »

kabdib wrote: post #21
kabdib wrote: post #10

... and that's three more than the average Atari marketing exec had back then. No wonder they had trouble understanding the game industry :-)

Okay, a true story, my second disappointing interaction with Atari marketing. One fine day my boss came to me and said that he had an ask from Atari Marketing (in the Home Computer arm of the company). The marketing drone came to my office (yes, we had offices in those days). "My idea is to pre-copyright all possible 8x8 bitmaps so that people can't use them without our permission. Can you print them out for me so we…

I was curious, so I threw it into Wolfram alpha:

(weight of a sheet of paper) * 5^64

.4 x Milky Way mass

Almost half the galaxy mass, that's a lot of grains of rice!

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#23

Post by kabdib »

arijun wrote: post #22
kabdib wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, a true story, my second disappointing interaction with Atari marketing. One fine day my boss came to me and said that he had an ask from Atari Marketing (in the Home Computer arm of the company). The marketing drone came to my office (yes, we had offices in those days). "My idea is to pre-copyright all possible 8x8 bitmaps so that people can't use them without our permission. Can you print them out for me so we…

I was curious, so I threw it into Wolfram alpha: (weight of a sheet of paper) * 5^64 .4 x Milky Way mass Almost half the galaxy mass, that's a lot of grains of rice!

Actually it's a LOT more than that, since each of the 5 colors has 128 possible values. There's some duplication (same color slot, trivial rotations and reflections and such) but I think the order of magnitude is probably "cluster of galaxies" at a minimum :-)

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#24

Post by giuse »

pjrule wrote: post #8

As someone working on a reinforcement learning/neuroevolution problem right now, I find this to be extremely exciting. Fewer parameters, ceteris paribus , is always better—the fact that the experiments in this paper were run on one workstation, rather than on a massive farm of TPUs à la AlphaGo, implies quicker development iteration time and more accessibility to the average researcher. The staging of components in t…

You may be interested in an even older paper: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/icdl2011cuccu.pdf

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#25

Post by giuse »

mkrum wrote: post #11
giuse wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby should be perfectly legible with a Python background, but for any question just ping me on twitter. I would be happy to build a dialog :)

Just curious, why did you pick ruby over python? Personal familiarity?

Sure, familiarity matters. But I believe in the rational reasons that brought me back to this tool over and over, until I built familiarity indeed :) I posted an overbloated discussion on it on Reddit, feel free to read as little as you need ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/8p1o8d/r_p...

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#26

Post by giuse »

vidarh wrote: post #17
mkrum wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, why did you pick ruby over python? Personal familiarity?

It's particularly interesting that they've chosen to wrap Python using Pycall. I'd love to hear about the tradeoffs of that.

Sure! It's quite simple: works like a charm. Completely transparent. You `import` with Python-like syntax, and you get a Ruby object that transparently forwards any message (i.e. method calls) to the corresponding Python object on the underlying Python interpreter.

This means that Ruby does not need to know _anything_ about the Python object: whatever you call on the Ruby object is just forwarded to the Python one, and whatever result is passed back to Ruby.

About the overhead, I sincerely do not know; I expected to have some so my code does part of the image pre-processing directly in Python (`narray`) in order to pass a smaller object to Ruby, but besides that I could perceive none -- grain of salt advised, as that was possibly hidden from me because my computation in Ruby was orders of magnitude more complex/time consuming than what was going on on the Python interpreter.

Definitely ping Murata-san either on GitHub https://github.com/mrkn/pycall.rb/ or Twitter `@mrkn`, I will send him a link to this thread so he can contribute if he feels like it. Personally, I am a fan of his work and elegant approach, I owe him for enabling me to keep working in Ruby while everybody publishes code in Python :)

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#27

Post by vidarh »

giuse wrote: post #26
vidarh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's particularly interesting that they've chosen to wrap Python using Pycall. I'd love to hear about the tradeoffs of that.

Sure! It's quite simple: works like a charm. Completely transparent. You `import` with Python-like syntax, and you get a Ruby object that transparently forwards any message (i.e. method calls) to the corresponding Python object on the underlying Python interpreter. This means that Ruby does not need to know _anything_ about the Python object: whatever you call on the Ruby object is just forwarded to the Python one, a…

Sounds great - I also prefer Ruby very strongly, and have tended to avoid Python code because I didn't expect to have an easy way of wrapping it, but will definitively have to play with Pycall.

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#29

Post by pjrule »

giuse wrote: post #24
pjrule wrote: post #8

As someone working on a reinforcement learning/neuroevolution problem right now, I find this to be extremely exciting. Fewer parameters, ceteris paribus , is always better—the fact that the experiments in this paper were run on one workstation, rather than on a massive farm of TPUs à la AlphaGo, implies quicker development iteration time and more accessibility to the average researcher. The staging of components in t…

You may be interested in an even older paper: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/icdl2011cuccu.pdf

Thanks so much! I read this (and a few related papers) today. Besides the novel algorithm discussed in the new Atari paper, do you have a reference implementation of online vector quantization you might be able to recommend? I think I could probably figure it out from the paper alone, but sometimes it's nice to see code other people have already optimized. :)

Re: Playing Atari with Six Neurons

#30

Post by arijun »

kabdib wrote: post #23
arijun wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious, so I threw it into Wolfram alpha: (weight of a sheet of paper) * 5^64 .4 x Milky Way mass Almost half the galaxy mass, that's a lot of grains of rice!

Actually it's a LOT more than that, since each of the 5 colors has 128 possible values. There's some duplication (same color slot, trivial rotations and reflections and such) but I think the order of magnitude is probably "cluster of galaxies" at a minimum :-)

Wow, that increases it by a lot; it's much, much heavier than the mass of the visible universe [0]. Universe is ~1e50 kg, the marketing exec's request was ~1e500kg. Now you can go back in time and tell them just how wrong they are ;)

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?source=frontpage-immediat...

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