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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

#851

Post by wtetzner »

antris wrote: post #702
PeterStuer wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't optimize for competitive performance (it is trivial to design a game AI that beats every player every time given that you have control over tilting the playing field). You use the AI for bounded response variations (all NPC's act 'natural' and different from the others) and engaging procedural generation (Here is a chapter of a story, now draft an entire zone with landscape, NPC's, cities, quest story lines…

One of the design goals of game AIs is also that they are fun to play against. If they are too smart and coordinated, they try to throw you off in a way that feels "unfair" to the player. You have to hit a spot where they are sometimes a bit surprising, but not in a way that cannot be reacted to quickly on your feet. This throws realism out of the window.

But why would good game AI have to make the characters better than the player? The focus on NPC AI should be to make them interesting, not necessarily really tough opponents.

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

#852

Post by TheCoelacanth »

PaulHoule wrote: post #819
quicknir wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally don't bother but this comment is so profoundly ridiculous I had to say something. Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us". A very large chunk of these people are geniuses. Those jobs are incredibly hard to get, and most of these people are reading everything that is getting published, on an ongoing basis, and are outputting something novel, on an ongoing bas…

Granted. But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science". That is, ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers. In some sense that keeps people honest, it also lowers the cost of creating training data, but it only teaches people how to do the same data set over and over again, not how to do a fresh one. So a lot of t…

> ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers.

There are surely a lot of researchers doing that, but do you really think anyone who has a plausible claim at being one of the top 100 researchers in the field in the entire world is doing that? Even if there are only 100 people doing truly novel research, that's still 100 times as many people as are going to be working on Carmack's research.

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

#853

Post by criddell »

munificent wrote: post #832
PaulHoule wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted. But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science". That is, ML researchers mainly do competitions on the same data sets, trying to put up better numbers. In some sense that keeps people honest, it also lowers the cost of creating training data, but it only teaches people how to do the same data set over and over again, not how to do a fresh one. So a lot of t…

> But the academic activity is focused around the kind of activities that Kuhn calls "Normal Science". True, but even Kuhn would note that most paradigm shifts still come from within the field. You don't need complete outsiders and, as far as I know, outsiders revolutionizing a field are quite rare. You need someone (a) who can think outside the box, but you also need (b) someone who has all of the relevant backgroun…

> But the odds of him making some big leap in AGI are very slim.

That's probably true. I look at this as Carmack running his own PhD program. I expect he will expand what we know about computation and the AGI problem before he's done.

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

#854

Post by criddell »

quicknir wrote: post #799
fastball wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the "field of researchers" is that most of us aren't geniuses. We're just plugging away at problems, like normal people. The opportunity for a genius is to come in, synthesize all existing information on the subject, and then come up with a novel approach to the whole thing. In some part, I think that is what Elon Musk has been able to do effectively. He comes into a field that already exists, reads…

I normally don't bother but this comment is so profoundly ridiculous I had to say something. Tenured ML professors at the top 100 or so universities in the world aren't "most of us". A very large chunk of these people are geniuses. Those jobs are incredibly hard to get, and most of these people are reading everything that is getting published, on an ongoing basis, and are outputting something novel, on an ongoing bas…

> Carmack doing it would just be another drop in the bucket.

If this research is as compute intensive as it seems to be, Carmack's contribution might be that he increases the rate other researchers can add their drops to the bucket.

Carmack isn't the first techie to take on a big hard problem. Jeff Hawkins, a name many of us also know, did as well.

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

#855

Post by aruggirello »

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…

As a side note, if we're living in a simulation [0], I'd really like to know who's "real" vs. who's an AI bot out there...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

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

#856

Post by Animats »

arethuza wrote: post #611
lawlessone wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way i think it can be done is simulated evolution.. be that simulated evolution of neural nets or something else. As others have mentioned here though.. this becomes horrifying if we've created something sentient to kill in games or enslave.

Reverse engineering a human mind would be another approach.

Check out OpenWorm. They're trying to reverse engineer the simplest organism with a nervous system, a nematode with 302 neurons. They're making progress, but not very fast. That approach is going to be a long haul.

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

#857

Post by LegitShady »

mattmar96 wrote: post #850
LegitShady wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am familiar with it.

I just don't see this massive string of successes in every field. I see his huge expertise in graphics engines and games.

But it didn't help him with VR - in fact he got in trouble with VR and ended up landing with a company I have no respect for and he didn't make VR a thing.

Many people have a way of looking at things differently. I just don't see the reason this is news, unless you own facebook shares or something. Even then zero effect.

I say all this as the owner of two VR headsets (A vive for roomscale and a Lenovo Explorer for simracing/flying).

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

#858

Post by b3kart »

marvin wrote: post #784
b3kart wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“_Specifically_ working on Artificial _General_ Intelligence” is a bit like “As a physics major I’ve decided to specialise in physics.”

Well.... There's the possibility that there's a certain degree of myopia in the AI field as a whole. As in, we know that there are some pretty gaping holes in our models and understanding, and most of the effort is spent on refining approaches that we have already validated. Maybe a better analogy would be "specialize physical theories that work in all environments, not have to be adapted separately for the ocean, sp…

There's certainly a lot to be done, and we'll likely need new approaches. But is it really productive to be tackling a general problem when we don't even know how to solve specific sub-problems? Especially if solving said sub-problems would bring a lot of value in its own right.

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

#859

Post by pvarangot »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #276
pvarangot wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, "quantum mechanics and cognition are very complex and therefore equivalent", sorry I don't know who to attribute the quote to.

I think you're recalling the end of this comic[1], which was on the front page of HN a couple weeks ago. So the quote is probably attributable to either Scott Aaronson or Zach Weinersmith. [1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

Yes! Thanks

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

#860

Post by mindfulmonkey »

aruggirello wrote: post #855
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…

As a side note, if we're living in a simulation [0], I'd really like to know who's "real" vs. who's an AI bot out there... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

Hate to break it to you, but we're all NPCs
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