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John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

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Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#521
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it sounds weird to me because Carmack has spent his whole life involved with games but has not been known for an interest in game AI before.

Game AI has nothing to do with AGI (or even regular AI) beyond the surface level description OP provided. The reason game AI hasn't progressed in the last few decades isn't because technology is holding us back - after all we can already achieve impressive machine learning feats using current-gen GPUs - it's because bad NPC AI is by design , so players can learn to overcome them and succeed. Very few people want to p…

You're assuming game AI means an agent that directly competes with the player.

Plenty of games have NPCs with scripted routines, dialog, triggers, etc that could be improved either by reducing the dev cost to generate them without reducing quality or reacting to player behavior more naturally.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#522

This doesn't surprise me at all. He went on a week long cabin-in-the-middle-of-nowhere trip about a year ago to dive in to AI (that's all this guy needs to become pretty damn proficient). (edit: I'm not claiming he's a field expert in a week guys, just that he can probably learn the basics pretty fast, especially given ML tech shares many base maths with graphics) As recent as his last Oculus Connect keynote, he exto…

> he extolled his frustration with having to do the sort of "managing up" of constantly having to convince others of a technical path he sees as critical. Sigh. I assumed the whole point of hiring John Carmack is that you trust him to identify critical problems - and to find the best way to solve them.

... to the extent and up until it helps get the product off the ground. Beyond that, the primary benefit is PR - "oh, that's the gaming hardware made by Carmack himself, so it must be good".

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#523

This is encouraging. If you're going to work on artificial general intelligence, a reasonable context in which to work on it is game NPCs. They have to operate in a world, interact with others, survive, and accomplish goals. Simulator technology is now good enough that you can do quite realistic worlds. Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work. Robotics has the same issue…

> Imagine The Sims, with a lot more internal smarts and real physics, as a base for work.

Sounds like the start of a truly horrifying Black Mirror episode

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I believe in this game / simulated world NPC idea too. To get the kind of complexity we want we either need sensors in the real world or interfacing in a virtual world that humans bring complexity to (probably both -- the humans are part of the sensing technology to start). Things like AlphaZero etc. got good cuz they had a simulatable model of the world (just a chess board + next state function in their case).…

Perhaps the first sentient program will be born in an MMORPG?

There's an entire Anime genre about that..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isekai

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#525
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current ML technology probably has little or nothing to do with whatever technology will eventually be needed to produce true AGI.

As I like to say: lots of people are working on making a car that is smart enough to drive itself wherever a human wants to go. How many people are working on a car smart enough to tell humans to fuck off, it doesn’t feel like driving anywhere today?

Self-driving cars and AGI are two different targets. We don't want a car that has a mind and can argue for itself. We want a car that's smart, but otherwise just a domesticated animal. We want to turn cars into horses.

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#526
post #335
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't prove it, but I will tell you why I believe it. We can't build a conscious machine because I believe there is a spiritual aspect to life that we have thus far failed to empirically observe or measure. Put another way, I believe all humans have a "spirit" inside of them, and that said spirit is a prerequisite of conscious thought. This same spirit is what makes life after death possible. This belief, of course…

So because of vitalism and dualism whoo whoo.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AlphaZero has coded all the rules for the respective three games, they do a tree search and their neural network output layer has exactly n neurons for max(n) possible moves. Although it's impressive they don't teach it heuristics and strategies, it's a very specific task. What about pigeons predicting breast cancer with 99% probability, rats learning to drive cars, monkeys building tools? Rodents stand a bigger chan…

You are talking about AlphaGo. AlphaZero was not given any prior knowledge of the game and is trained exclusively through self-play -- and it outperforms Monte Carlo tree search-based systems such as AlphaGo and Stockfish in chess 100-0 with a fraction of the training time. AlphaZero is also capable of playing Chess, Shogi and Go at a super-super-human.

Not working in this area but the abstract of the AlphaZero paper [0] seems to disagree about your /any prior knowledge/ point: "Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case."

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless teathering is the future of VR. True mobility is pointless when you're realistically restricted to a dedicated space anyways.

You should take more long haul flights if you think mobile is pointless.

What class are you flying that you have enough free space around you for hands to make any use of a VR headset on the plane?

(Also, even with the space, I'm not sure I'd be brave enough to try and use one in air - adding turbulence and random vibrations on top of the usual VR issues sounds pretty nauseating even as I type it.)

Re: John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big player on the field. I'm specialized in semantic parsing and argument checking. I'm the first to my knowledge to have made a syllogism (and more) checker for English. Also, I have allowed researchers to beat the state of the art on constituency and dependency parsing (but simply by sharing knowledge of the state of the art to other researchers). I do this on my free time so I'm not productive, but I hav…

> I'm the first to my knowledge to have made a syllogism (and more) checker for English. Either what you actually mean by "syllogism checker" is extremely specific and unpractical, or this is 100% BS.

My program check the validity with 0% false positives of the 256 possible forms of syllogisms. This is not bullshit and not that complicated.
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