111–120 of 139 posts
A summary to undo the clickbait: AI is making chess beautiful by making it easy to check how new rules affect playability. Rule changes suggested in the article are: - No castling - Allowing self capture - Pawns can move sideways - Pawns can move 2 squares at a time
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I don’t know much bridge so please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that “cheating” basically applying steganography to game moves? It’s not like touching your ear at the right time or some other kind of back channel. It’s all represented by game moves. That sounds tractable for an algorithm.
Well yes, that and actual cheating (the competitive scene if rife with cheating of all kinds). If AI teammates were allowed to have a pre-developed, shared model between them for communication so the other automatically "knows" what the others moves mean then it would be closer to fair grounds but that's considered cheating even though human teammates do the same thing.
When I was in college, a Monopoly game appeared on the DEC-10. Playing that for a while completely ruined the game for me. Then someone wrote a bot to play ADVENT, which ruined that, too. My ability to play chess declined precipitously after I learned how to program, because while thinking of my next move I'd always digress into how to design a program to do the work for me. I originally wrote the Empire game because…
Walter, your D source code link on classicempire.com fails with a permission error. Kudos to you for creating what Wikipedia credits as (according to one ranking in 1996) the 8th most popular game of all time. Considering the power of most portable devices these days have you considered revisiting Empire for an IOS or Android version?
I'll announce it here:
> In chess, AlphaZero initially doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces. Over hours of high-speed play against successively more powerful incarnations of itself, it becomes more skilled, and to some eyes more natural, than prior chess engines. 'doesn’t know it can take an opponent’s pieces' - really? How would the world be different if it did 'know'? I know this is kind of a nitpick, but I'm tired of all the me…
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That's because the AI isn't allowed to cheat. The skill of "world class" bridge play mainly lies in creative ways to cheat.
I don’t know much bridge so please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that “cheating” basically applying steganography to game moves? It’s not like touching your ear at the right time or some other kind of back channel. It’s all represented by game moves. That sounds tractable for an algorithm.
Sort of, except you have to tell your opponents what your algorithm is. Like you can invent a system where an opening bid of "one heart" means "I have exactly three aces" (as opposed to the conventional meaning of "I have a reasonably strong hand with hearts as my longest suit"), but you can't keep that meaning secret.
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Even if a new game mode is found to enhance gameplay, AI would master these variations quickly reducing the novelty of them. The best attempt I've seen is Fisher random chess which attempts to create so many unique starting positions that memorizing openings becomes impossible. It ends up leading to really unique situations, and in some cases even a first move advantage for black.
I don't think the point is to make something hard for computers; rather, the goal is to make high level human chess matches more interesting
For example, chess players used to practice (or invent) novel openings to surprise their opponents. Now that AI has explored such a huge range of the game space it can simply show you the optimal moves for each opening. So for humans there's less exploration and more memorization. You're simply trying to follow a path that AI has paved rather than find a new path.
It's kind of like how tic tac toe is fun as a kid until you discover how you can tie everytime. Even with these new rules AI would rapidly find optimal strategies that humans would then race to replicate.
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Any game built around word play or humour. E.g. "I'm sorry I haven't a Clue"[1] or something like Cards Against Humanity. Though I imagine someone is trying to apply GPT-3 to these sorts of games already. Beyond that, any sort of narrative based RPG or exploration game (e.g. legend of Zelda) would be hard to do 'properly', i.e. without scripting a bot. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Sorry_I_Haven%27t_a_Cl.…
Actually, I'd wager that Cards Against Humanity would be one of the games a model would be best at over a human. There are only a limited number of white cards that could work with any given black card and it could fairly quickly bucket a player into certain types most likely to pick certain cards. Would it be perfect? No, but that's the nature of the game and with only seven options and no branching paths it doesn't…
Dixit is a bunch of very different pictures and the goal is to say something about the card you've picked such that some of the other players will know which one it was but not all of them, your opponents are listening to your description and can pick from their own hands of cards. You get points for: Identifying the correct card based on the description when it isn't your turn; Playing a card which people mistook for the correct card when it isn't your turn; Some but not all other players guessing your card when it was your turn.
So that ends up being about shared experiences and culture, because if you share culture with someone you can allude to some element of the picture in a way that's completely opaque to everybody who doesn't share that culture, allowing the "in group" to identify your card while everybody else can't do better than luck.
For an AI there are two interesting challenges. Firstly, in "understanding" the pictures shown on the cards. It's not enough to be like "That's a cat" "That's a book" "That's a tree" you need somehow to compete with a human that thinks "Hmm, that's kinda like the Rapunzel story except it's a bird instead of a princess?" and "The dragon looks happy"
But then the AI also needs cultural context like a human player so it can try to judge good descriptions: "Happy Dragon" is obviously this card, "Cat" might be any of half a dozen cards, how about "I am your father" as a reference to the Cloud City scene that looks a bit like this picture - and so it can try to pick cards that match human descriptions to steal points that way.
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The rare occasions that I played against my wife and tried to castle, she rejected it outright with, "No fancy moves!"
The true metagame
https://youtu.be/i-oDOJlWBTw?t=1849
"That's castling sweetheart... It's an advanced level manoeuvre, they added it in the last patch."
Question for those knowledgeable on AI: what sort of game would be easy for a human to understand, but difficult or impossible for a computer to play or easily defeat humans? I imagine one based purely on randomness, like dice, would be one. I remember reading somewhere that languages like Finnish and Hungarian are difficult for computers to parse, [1] due to their agglutinative grammatical structure. Not sure if tha…
Starting variation (like Arimaa), takes opening books off the table. In general, high branching factors (possible moves at any situation) are more difficult. Humans have an intuitive sense for which moves are reasonable at any situation, or whether a line of play is productive. Branching factor is part of why Go was so much harder than chess. Hidden information is hard: computers are not good at the "thinking in anot…
The state of the art for Poker goes like this:
Heads Up Limit Texas Hold 'Em is effectively solved.
Not just "There's an AI which is very good at it" there is literally a fixed strategy I can reveal in advance and that strategy will statistically break even against an equally efficient strategy or else gradually take all your chips if you don't have a similar perfect strategy. Even though you know exactly what the strategy is, you can't beat it anyway.
At No Limit the clear champion is AI. Pluribus, Libratus and Deepstack all play clearly better poker, it's not practical to conceive a "solved" or even "near solved" like Cepheus strategy for No Limit, but the AI is tireless and it's disheartening for humans to just find every strategy countered so I expect them to get worse not better.
I don't expect any further exhibition type matches for AI versus professionals at poker because of this success.
Now, full ring is different, but largely because of the social dynamics. If you're at a table with six humans and one AI, obviously all of the humans will co-operate to force out the AI since the alternative is the AI wins. So that's not a very interesting problem.
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I get that this is true of real cars, but is it really true of simulated cars? Can you share an example?
There are no racing simulators or even games that have reasonable AI opponents that don't cheat. I, mid-tier sim racer, have no chance against good AI in hotlapping on track in some popular sims, but all of them either yield or cause a crash that would take them to the stewards (or grave) when racing for position on the same piece of track. Pro racing team have excellent sims these days but they don't have AI opponen…
Forgive this comparison, but the ai drivers in mario kart games also cheat, but aren't particularly representative of current state ML tech. There's likely no ML involved in them at all. There's not much in the way of actual attempts to do this with ML either so it's not proof either way (especially on new untrained courses).