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An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

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Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#121

Post by wildmanx »

edejong wrote: post #115
TomAnthony wrote: post #10

Similar story of unexpected AI outcomes... As part of my PhD research, I created a simplified Pac-Man style game where the agent would simply try to stay alive as long as possible whilst being chased by the 3 ghosts. The agent was un-motivated and understood nothing about the goal, but was optimising for maximising its observable control over the world (avoiding death is a natural outcome of this). I spent sometime t…

Same story as one I shared 4 years ago. Seems to be the best tactic! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031932 Edit: don’t want to sound accusatory

"Completely predictable" is different from "This would minimize the probability of being fenced in by the four ghosts." no?

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#122

Post by jeremysalwen »

edejong wrote: post #115
TomAnthony wrote: post #10

Similar story of unexpected AI outcomes... As part of my PhD research, I created a simplified Pac-Man style game where the agent would simply try to stay alive as long as possible whilst being chased by the 3 ghosts. The agent was un-motivated and understood nothing about the goal, but was optimising for maximising its observable control over the world (avoiding death is a natural outcome of this). I spent sometime t…

Same story as one I shared 4 years ago. Seems to be the best tactic! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14031932 Edit: don’t want to sound accusatory

No need to be accusatory. The stories are different, just the learned behavior is the same. And not very surprising, considering your story was pre-empted by Pac-Man speedrunners, who already discovered this technique, which they call "kiting".

You can see the paper OP wrote to confirm for yourself that their story is not the same as yours: https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/15376/906989....

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#123

Post by goatlover »

colinmhayes wrote: post #120
wombatmobile wrote: post #91

The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4 What he means is that computers, which can learn rules and use those rules to make predictions in certain domains, nevertheless cannot exercise general intelligence because they are not "in the world". This renders them…

Imagine being a dualist in the 21st century.

What in the parent post is dualist? Sounds more like an argument that animals have embodied intelligence.

But as for being a dualist in the 21st century, there is always consciousness, information and math. All three of which can lead to some form of dualism/platonism.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#124

Post by mattowen_uk »

We don't have AI. AI is a buzzphrase overused by the media. What we have is Machine Learning (ML). If and only if, we get past the roadblock of the 'agent' creating some usable knowledge out of an unprogrammed experience, and forming conclusions based on that, will we have AI. For now, the mantra 'Garbage-in-garbage-out' applies; if the controller of the agent gets their rule-set wrong, the agent will not behave as expected. This is not AI. The agent hasn't learnt by itself that it is wrong.

For example, there's a small child who is learning to walk. The child falls down a lot. Eventually the child will work out a long list of arbitrary negatives connected to its wellbeing that are associated with falling down.

However, the parents, being impatient, reach inside the child's head and directly tweak some variables so that the child has more dread of falling over than they do of walking. Did the child learn this, or was it told ?

We currently do the latter every time an agent gets something wrong. Left to their own devices, 99.9% of agents will continue to fall down over and over again until the end of time.

We have a long way to go before we can say we've created 'AI'.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#125

Post by frozenport »

ajuc wrote: post #101
markwkw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, from technical perspective it's a nothing story. It's interesting, though, how strong of a reaction general public had to this. The story must have strongly resonated with what some folks were already feeling. When you squint (pretend to understand the technology not at all) it's a tragic story. The situation of the wolf seems similar to the situation of some people. Chasing their careers in a highly structu…

Similarly I've seen A LOT of people posting stories about "chat bot exposed to internet started praising Hitler and became racist/sexist/antisemitic" as a proof that "supreme intellect sees through leftist political correctness and knows that alt-right is correct about everything".

I think a lot of those people are joking?

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#126

Post by Tenoke »

mattowen_uk wrote: post #124

We don't have AI. AI is a buzzphrase overused by the media. What we have is Machine Learning (ML). If and only if, we get past the roadblock of the 'agent' creating some usable knowledge out of an unprogrammed experience, and forming conclusions based on that, will we have AI. For now, the mantra 'Garbage-in-garbage-out' applies; if the controller of the agent gets their rule-set wrong, the agent will not behave as e…

Definitions change, and it seems pointless to deny that AI is just used to mean 'modern ML'.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#127

Post by [deleted] »

FridayoLeary wrote: post #53
jhbadger wrote: post #4

I'm reminded of the fable (in Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence ) of the chess computer that ended up murdering anyone who tried to turn it off because in order to optimize winning chess games as programmed it has to be on and functional.

Which perverted mind would build into a chess computer the ability to kill?

[deleted]

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#128

Post by giantg2 »

dqpb wrote: post #111
giantg2 wrote: post #74

For some reason this makes me think of corporate policies - how some people game them and how others except that the incentives are unattainable.

It’s pretty similar to quitting once all your equity has vested.

I was mostly thinking about my own experience where the company screwed me over enough times that I feel no incentive to try hard. Take the least risk, focus on not losing point rather than gaining them, because I'll never catch a "sheep".

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#129

Post by dnautics »

Tenoke wrote: post #126
mattowen_uk wrote: post #124

We don't have AI. AI is a buzzphrase overused by the media. What we have is Machine Learning (ML). If and only if, we get past the roadblock of the 'agent' creating some usable knowledge out of an unprogrammed experience, and forming conclusions based on that, will we have AI. For now, the mantra 'Garbage-in-garbage-out' applies; if the controller of the agent gets their rule-set wrong, the agent will not behave as e…

Definitions change, and it seems pointless to deny that AI is just used to mean 'modern ML'.

Not even, we've used AI to describe entirely preprogrammed and non-ml agents in video games for decades now.

Is it artificial? Does it make decisions? It's an AI. Even if it's crappy, and not very intelligent.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#130

Post by SubiculumCode »

markwkw wrote: post #87
spywaregorilla wrote: post #76

Seems like a nothing story. Just looking at the game, there's obviously a constant decision to be made of chase more sheep or instantly die. It sounds like in the original model they had a max of 20 seconds, so it's not surprising that you would just tank your losses to maximize your score every now and then. Anyone who tries to devise optimal strategies for things should be able to see this isn't especially interest…

Exactly, from technical perspective it's a nothing story. It's interesting, though, how strong of a reaction general public had to this. The story must have strongly resonated with what some folks were already feeling. When you squint (pretend to understand the technology not at all) it's a tragic story. The situation of the wolf seems similar to the situation of some people. Chasing their careers in a highly structu…

Exactly. It is a social commentary story where a result from a student's project was a lucid analogy of the plight of their lived rat-race in modern China, with the lesson being: Cut your losses and lie flat. To those within ML field, this is less than new, but as a commentary on how such ML issues can be a teachable and easily understood analogy to people's lives certainly makes the story interesting to me.
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