An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep • Hacker News Board

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#221

Post by wombatmobile » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #215

colinmhayes wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't a computer have ambitions and desires? Why can't it seek pleasure and feel pain? The only answer is dualism or we don't know how to wire it properly yet.

Or we don't have the proper design. If we want machines to be like animals, maybe we need to make them that way. Like the replicants in Blade Runner, or the humanoid "toasters" in the recent Battlestar Galactica.

It’s easy for a human to make another human, by combining with another human. If it’s the right human, it’s fun. If it’s the wrong human, it’s a disaster.

How to have fun and avoid disaster? That’s a definition of intelligence.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#222

Post by phkahler » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 12:24 PM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #163

phkahler wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good because most people can understand it. I'd say it's a perfect strategy for a game, but if they're using evolutionary algorithms they should require some form of reproduction for the wolves to carry on. That would make the suicide strategy fail to propagate well. I can also see a number of possible strange outcomes even then.

You're conflating the evolution of the strategy with the idea of the evolution of the actor being controlled by the agent. To give an obvious example, if dying gave 100 points instead of subtracting 10, even the dumbest evolutionary algo would learn to commit suicide asap. The survival of the actor has no intrinsic relevance to how the evolution develops.

>> You're conflating the evolution of the strategy with the idea of the evolution of the actor being controlled by the agent.

Yes.

The survival of the actor has no intrinsic relevance to how the evolution develops.

No, not in this case. That was my point. That's why the outcome should not be surprising.

Re: An AI wolf that preferred suicide over eating sheep

#223

Post by vladTheInhaler » Fri, Jul 09, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

fny wrote: post #79

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…

If I remember correctly there were similar scenarios that would occur using that popular Berkeley Pacman universe where he would run into a ghost to avoid the penalty of living for too long.

The example you're thinking of is actually in gridworld [1]. As you allud to, one of the parameters of the model is the cost of simply being alive for an additional time-step. If the cost is negative (a reward), then the agent will just sit there forever and accumulate infinite points. If it is zero, it might still just sit there to avoid falling into the hole, which has a large penalty and ends the simulation. As you turn up the dial on the cost of living, the agent starts using more and more aggressive strategies to reach the goal quickly. But if you make it too big, it will just jump in the hole.

[1] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/fa18/assets/slides/lec...