John Carmack: I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence • Hacker News Board

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

#841

Post by goostavos » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:47 PM UTC

croon wrote: post #651

sobani wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in those cases it's even more important that the NPCs don't do anything unexpected. Those NPCs are like actors in a stage play, you don't want them to come up with their own lines and confusing the audience. Don't forget there is a certain randomness with 'more natural' and with randomness you're going to invite Murphy to the party.

In many cases maybe. Personally I would love to play a game with a world inhabited by "individual" NPC AI:s, where they can influence the world as much as I can, with no specific act structure or story arc. Some significant part of gaming is risk-free experimentation in a simulated world. The experiments possible are bounded by the simulation quality of the world. More realistic NPC behavior would open up for a lot m…

There is an older game called STALKER which had (limited) elements of what you describe: autonomous NPCs which influence the game world. Even though it was limited, the NPCs just battled for control of certain territories, I always thought it was a really neat mechanic. It made the world feel more 'real' and alive.

You would see these factions fighting and gaining/losing territory throughout the game. You could chose to help them or just pass on by, but the actions progressed regardless of your choice.

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

#842

Post by Animats » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

iandanforth wrote: post #776

Animats wrote: post #313

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…

Hi John! Animats was very cool! As you know game physics still kinda sucks for this work. Unity/Bullet/MuJoCo are the best we have and even they have limited body collision counts. Luckily we've now got some GPU physics acceleration, but IMO it's not enough. What we really need is a scalable, distributed, physics pipeline so we can scale sims to 1000x realtime with billions of colliding objects. My guess is that Goog…

What we really need is a scalable, distributed, physics pipeline so we can scale sims to 1000x realtime with billions of colliding objects.

Improbable tried to do that with Spatial OS. They spent $500 million on it.[1] Read the linked article. No big game company uses it, because they cut a deal with Google so their system has to run on Google's servers. It costs too much there, and Google can turn off your air supply any time they want to, so there's a huge business risk.

[1] https://improbable.io/blog/the-future-of-the-game-engine

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

#843

Post by chrisweekly » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:51 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #665

Animats wrote: post #313

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…

> 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. I don't think so. Game NPCs don't need AI, which would be way overkill; they just need to provide the illusion of agency. I think for general AI you need a field where any other option else would be suboptimal or inadequate, but in videogames general AI is the suboptimal option.…

If his true purpose were to improve on videogames' NPCs, you're 100% right that working on "real" AGI would be overkill. But in this case, someone w/ deep background in videogaming intends to use that context as a means to the end of AGI R&D -- a possibly subtle, but crucial distinction.

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

#844

Post by marcusverus » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #444

nikki93 wrote: post #422

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).…

Board games have been solved. Now the big boys are working on Starcraft and Dota 2, and it takes a shitload of money to pay for the compute and simulation necessary to train them. No something you can do on the cheap.

Deepmind's StarCraft AIs are already competing at the Grandmaster level[0], which is the highest tier of competitive play and represents the top 0.6 % of competitors.

I am pleasantly surprised by how quickly they have been tackling big new decision spaces.

[0]https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-leve...

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

#845

Post by redisman » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #203

JaRail wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Progress in AI is due to data and computational power advances. I think you'd be surprised how much progress is also being made outside those two factors. It's sort of like saying graphics only improve with more RAM and faster compute. We know there's more to it than that. In many cases, the cutting edge of a few years ago is easily bested by today's tutorial samples and 30 seconds of training. We're doing better w…

But not towards AGI. We're just improving on narrow AI after recent breakthroughs thanks to the hardware being powerful enough and large datasets being available.

Having access to cheap and scalable compute and storage should be helpful for AGI too. It doesn't solve anything but it does give more access to more people.

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

#846

Post by LegitShady » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

carlosdp wrote: post #68

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…

It's funny people talk about Palmer and carmack in vr but Oculus was built on appropriated valve tech and neither Palmer or Carmack have succeeded in making VR a thing.

As far as I can tell Carmack is an old engineer whose name gets thrown around for headlines. If there weren't articles about his stealing stuff to take to Oculus I don't think his presence there would be observable.

Now people are talking like Carmack switching topics is going to change the world. It's just going to change his schedule. There are smarter engineers already working on this problem.

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

#847

Post by shrimp_emoji » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

jcims wrote: post #415

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say holy crap that video was amazing - exciting and suspenseful!

Here's another one for ya if you get stuck with a case of the nosleeps - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wKu13wmHog Something about predatory nature of both insects seems to tune up their intelligence. Of course it never hurts having the BBC tell your story either.

>Something about predatory nature of both insects seems to tune up their intelligence.

Yep. To be a predator, you need to outwit your prey and think fast, so it's thought to be a natural INT grinder. `w´

Presumably, this could drive up the INT of prey too, but maybe it's cheaper to just be faster/harder to see? But you can't be THAT hard to see, and the speed only saves you in failed ambushes, so planning successful ambushes continues to reward the INT of predators (unless they just enter the speed arms race, like cheetahs or tiger beetles).

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

#848

Post by jimsmart » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 7:10 PM UTC

mrd999 wrote: post #760

bildung wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every child reinvents the concept. It wasn't there on birth, and the word and phrases didn't contain it. That's a bit difficult topic to wrap ones head around, but it is critically important to differ between signified (the concept) and signifier (the words etc.). The child develops concepts and is able to create and evaluate inferences , and thus able to understand metaphors etc. The concept is what most AI approach…

You're the only person who mentioned metaphors here. My intuition tells me metaphors will be key to developing AGI. Metaphors literally generalize; they predict; they organize and catalogue. Formation, testing, and introspection of metaphors seems to be a way forward.

Related: Martin Hilpert has an excellent lecture/video on metaphor, as part of his Cognitive Linguistics course. Well worth a watch if this is a topic that interests you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0BYLpwSM6E

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

#849

Post by GloriousKoji » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #582

pyentropy wrote: post #163

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…

The natural environment encodes "all the rules" for real animals, too. You need some constraints or else there is nothing to be learned. One could say that every survival task is also specific , but is a slight variation of previously learned one. > pigeons predicting breast cancer with 99% pigeons contain 340M neurons (with dendrites and all, giving them higher computational capacity than ANN units). > Rodents stand…

Scientist have just recently taught rats how to play hide-and-seek for fun. Other scientists have found out that slime mold will model the Japanese railroad system. I wouldn't be surprised if rodents (plural) instinctively have a go strategy once someone figures how to make an analog game for them.

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

#850

Post by mattmar96 » Thu, Nov 14, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

LegitShady wrote: post #846

carlosdp wrote: post #68

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…

It's funny people talk about Palmer and carmack in vr but Oculus was built on appropriated valve tech and neither Palmer or Carmack have succeeded in making VR a thing. As far as I can tell Carmack is an old engineer whose name gets thrown around for headlines. If there weren't articles about his stealing stuff to take to Oculus I don't think his presence there would be observable. Now people are talking like Carmack…

Seems you aren't familiar with his seminal graphics work. He effectively kickstarted 3d gaming and created the FPS genre.

I'd be cautious dismissing his potential influence in the field. He has a way of looking at problems differently.