I see James Bond plot twists in the future.
Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
111–120 of 197 posts
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Any model which has no explicit understanding of the causal behaviour of an environment is going to misbehave for one of those unseen data points (eg. an unseen road in a weather/lighting/etc. condition I disagree. That sounds like an older interpretation of behavior of simple deep nets like the inception family. My experience with auto encoders and GANs is such that the nets can and unquestionably do interpolate be…
Again you're treating this as-if its a problem of finding a sufficiently smooth function over data points. The problem is that the right behaviour is not a model fitted to that data. It isn't "fitted" at all. When I turn the thermostat the temperature in the room increases. If the thermostat is broken, the temperature does not. The predicting the effect of the thermostat on the room requires intervening in the room t…
I think most of the systems do try to model the objects around them. Of course, that is also subject to its own statistical anomalies. See report of the Uber/pedestrian collision for what happens when that goes wrong.
I don't mean to dismiss your points, though. I wholely agree that if we really want to be moving towards an AI that is anything like animal intelligence, things like play are crucial. I'm a big fan of the attention schema theory. And if that is right, then building systems that can generate such models for their own mental state and others is the way to "consciousness".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
It's all well and good to build systems that can look at faces and statistically say, "oh they're mad". And I think people have this idea that maybe if we build enough of these systems and jam them together, we'll make an SI. But until we can build systems that can model why that person is mad, based on the system's own experience and models, we're just making parlor tricks.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Alternate routes" are still normal roads people travel on. Since the travel time of a path is just the sum of the travel time of all path segments you only need people traveling every road to estimate the total time of any path. Path finding is well understood with many algorithmic solutions, so there is no reason to use machine learning. Google's implementation is impressive, but I see no reason why it would benefi…
Google Maps is not just path finding; it also takes real-time traffic info into account.
Which is still just path finding: estimate travel time for each segment, use travel time instead of distance as edge cost.
Don't take that as a dismissal of Google maps: it's the most impressive path finder I know, working with high performance over long distances, taking into account real time information, and calculating meaningful alternative routes to choose from. It's an impressive piece of technology that actually makes the world a better place by saving humanity a lot of travel time that can now be spent on better activities.
Google Maps would certainly be high on my list of best inventions of the last few decades. At the same time the routing is just a good path finder with a good travel time estimator informed by real time data.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#114It sounded like it precomputed the route, steering, drift for the whole course first, then executed it. If the friction were variable and unknown it would get completely lost.
Which is very common, even in controlled drift events. Over the course of a single run, tires can completely change grip coefficients.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again you're treating this as-if its a problem of finding a sufficiently smooth function over data points. The problem is that the right behaviour is not a model fitted to that data. It isn't "fitted" at all. When I turn the thermostat the temperature in the room increases. If the thermostat is broken, the temperature does not. The predicting the effect of the thermostat on the room requires intervening in the room t…
I think most of the systems do try to model the objects around them. Of course, that is also subject to its own statistical anomalies. See report of the Uber/pedestrian collision for what happens when that goes wrong. I don't mean to dismiss your points, though. I wholely agree that if we really want to be moving towards an AI that is anything like animal intelligence, things like play are crucial. I'm a big fan of t…
I mean a very specific sort of model: a causal model.
A model of that kind has to be able to generate predictions given the agents interaction with the object. Ie., how will the thermostat behave if I turn on the air conditioning.
The problem is that we acquire these models during an entire lifetime of being embedded in an environment, esp. a social one.
A self-driving car is never going to predict human behaviour given its own behaviour without having lived a human life. The question of what it should do given how another driver/pedestrian/etc. behaves isn't something it can solve with "mere statistics".
It might be that human behaviour around roads ends up being extremely predictable, I'm doubtful that's the case. I think a car is going to need a Theory-of-Mind to navigate complex social driving environments, ie., a causal model of the behaviour of other animals.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, a new DeLorean isn't all that expensive compared to typical "jelly-bean" vehicles that are the most common. Back in 2005, I narrowed down a vehicle purchase decision to a new DeLorean, an used Lotus Elise or a new G coupe. I went with a bone-stock manual G that I kept for a few years before I got into Cold War-era West German and French vehicles. I'm not a rich person, far from it.
> a new DeLorean They're still making them?
Sort of. Someone bought the leftover parts from the original factory, and brought back the company name, selling completely refurbished ones. They've been trying to sell completely new ones as a low-volume automaker, but haven't successfully navigated the bureaucracy on that so far.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#117Can we just stop for a minute and admire the fact that there are people out there who have found a way to get paid to program a DeLorean to drift?
More like, if you can program a DeLorean to drift, someone will pay you for it.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#118Ken Block eat your heart out. He should trademark an enable Block mode.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Any model which has no explicit understanding of the causal behaviour of an environment is going to misbehave for one of those unseen data points (eg. an unseen road in a weather/lighting/etc. condition I disagree. That sounds like an older interpretation of behavior of simple deep nets like the inception family. My experience with auto encoders and GANs is such that the nets can and unquestionably do interpolate be…
Again you're treating this as-if its a problem of finding a sufficiently smooth function over data points. The problem is that the right behaviour is not a model fitted to that data. It isn't "fitted" at all. When I turn the thermostat the temperature in the room increases. If the thermostat is broken, the temperature does not. The predicting the effect of the thermostat on the room requires intervening in the room t…
To simplify, if you have a map of Ankh-Morpork on your wall and you put your finger on Sator Square, your finger is not in Sator Square, no matter how detailed the map is. If you moved your finger around on the map, you would not know what would happen if you moved your finger around in Ankh-Morpork, nor whether it's safe to do so, no matter how detailed the map is.
Re: Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward
#120Doesn't this sort of movement cause a lot of wear on the tires, thus making it unsuitable for routine use?
It's not supposed to be for routine use. The idea is that if the car gets into a situation where stability is lost it will know how to handle it.
As an example, imagine an autonomous car is going around a bend and hits a large patch of black ice and goes into a slide. Current systems will struggle to handle the car and it could result in a crash. With this knowledge added the car will know how to handle slides and will recover easily.
Another example (given in the article) is if a person darts out into the path of the car it can perform a sharp turn and gracefully handle manoeuvring around them without losing control using this knowledge.