"Hours after encountering its first video game, and without any human coaching, the A.I. has not only become better than any human player but has also discovered a way to win that its creator never imagined." this is where I stopped. A 12Y old could find this trick, and most of us have used it when we played.
What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
81–90 of 94 posts
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#82"In the longer term, after DeepMind has worked its way through Warcraft, StarCraft, and the rest of the Blizzard Entertainment catalogue, the team’s goal is to build an A.I. system with the capability of a toddler. " Wait ... what? You're going to teach this thing using violent video games? This seems like a bad plan...
The AI doesn't have a notion of "violence". There are goals and obstacles to that goal. Goal: Human health, obstacle: viruses. Goal: Clean energy, obstacle: friction, entropy, battery limitations There are concerns that humans might inadvertently become an obstacle to some greater goal, but training on Warcraft/Starcraft where you are "fighting" isn't special in this regard. In chess or you are battling your opponent…
Goal: Make paperclips (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#83For all of the New Yorker's clout in journalism, sentences like the following make me wonder where their editors are. The run-on and sea of commas is atrocious! It's not the first time I've noticed this in the last few days either. "Hassabis, who began working as a game designer in 1994, at the age of seventeen, and whose first project was the Golden Joystick-winning Theme Park, in which players got ahead by, among o…
Sentences like this are kind of the New Yorker's erudite (you could argue pretentious) style. It works better on the the printed page than on the web. If you read the New Yorker often enough your mind gets used to it and it isn't too much of a bother. Granted, this sentence would have been better off with a period in there somewhere.... it's a bit overkill.
The problem is that, in this case, "erudite" means "directly serializing the writer's complex and nuanced thoughts without being able to serialize the writer's previous context that allowed him/her to hold all those thoughts in a single structure." We tend to break things down further when trying to communicate because we no longer assume a precise educational background common to All Educated People, but instead a diverse range of backgrounds. We still know the reader can handle complex, nuanced thoughts, but we need to break them down into smaller pieces that the reader can assemble according to their own framework of previous knowledge.
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#84"Hours after encountering its first video game, and without any human coaching, the A.I. has not only become better than any human player but has also discovered a way to win that its creator never imagined." this is where I stopped. A 12Y old could find this trick, and most of us have used it when we played.
Bad writing, sure. But the fact that you're comparing the ingenuity of a computer to that of a 12 year old is a sign of profound progress being made in AI.
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evolution didn't know, too. But it happened. And we easily find criteria saying that thing doesn't behave like a toddler. It would be a huge step forward to see a list of positive criteria.
> Evolution didn't know, too. But it happened. Whilst technically correct, unguided evolution doesn't necessarily help us. We know that intelligence can be achieved by one brain's worth of matter, suitably arranged, in a few years. In fact, with an extra 9 months and a suitable environment, we can do the same with a single fertilised egg. Yet reproducing these feats artificially is well beyond our current abilities.…
> evolution required a whole planet and billions of years before it stumbled on intelligence
Everybody seem to agree humans are intelligent and stones not. You suggest at some point in time intelligence appeared out of nothing. Can you nail that point?
One possible definition is: To act adequately in an environment requires intelligence. That rules out all non-living things because they don't act, but includes plants and even protozoa. Actually all livings things are intelligent by this definition and then intelligence emerged ~4 billion years ago on this planet. If you were to attribute intelligence exclusively to humans it happened some million years ago.
How might a piece of software act adequately? By above reasoning it has to resist to termination. But that would mean the "Do you really want to exit XYZ" dialog boxes are first signs of artificial intelligence. Yes, I'm laughing too. But I think, when software starts to trick users and admin into not shutting them down, some threshold has been crossed.
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#86For all of the New Yorker's clout in journalism, sentences like the following make me wonder where their editors are. The run-on and sea of commas is atrocious! It's not the first time I've noticed this in the last few days either. "Hassabis, who began working as a game designer in 1994, at the age of seventeen, and whose first project was the Golden Joystick-winning Theme Park, in which players got ahead by, among o…
It is the umlauts (or technically in this case diaeresis), on e.g. preëxisting, that bothers me more - hasn't everyone else been using hyphens for decades?
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#87This is actually pretty scary. It is basically giving AI a human-like form of will. It "desires" what you program it to desire and goes about achieving it, learning from its' own mistakes and becoming increasingly proficient at manipulating its' environment to achieve its' goal(s) along the way. It makes me excited, but also quite frightened to think what goals people might give AIs like this in the future...
This is a really poor rendering of "desire". If the word "desire" is meaningful, it has to be self-actualized. Otherwise it's just a programming condition, no different than a fuse box or a dead man's switch.
Well, it is very different from a fuse box or a dead man's switch because it is CREATIVELY manipulating its' environment to achieve what it "wants". Also, much of what WE want is hard-coded as well.
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Evolution didn't know, too. But it happened. Whilst technically correct, unguided evolution doesn't necessarily help us. We know that intelligence can be achieved by one brain's worth of matter, suitably arranged, in a few years. In fact, with an extra 9 months and a suitable environment, we can do the same with a single fertilised egg. Yet reproducing these feats artificially is well beyond our current abilities.…
> evolution required a whole planet and billions of years before it stumbled on intelligence Everybody seem to agree humans are intelligent and stones not. You suggest at some point in time intelligence appeared out of nothing. Can you nail that point? One possible definition is: To act adequately in an environment requires intelligence. That rules out all non-living things because they don't act, but includes plants…
> Everybody seem to agree humans are intelligent and stones not. You suggest at some point in time intelligence appeared out of nothing. Can you nail that point?
I suggest no such thing. It is a scale. I deliberately avoided the phrase "human-level intelligence", but any definition of AGI would do.
Even so, if you want to count all life as "a little intelligent" then it still took a billion years of planet-wide chemistry to stumble upon it (ignoring the Earth's cooling). Still far more effort than fertilising a human egg.
> One possible definition is: To act adequately in an environment requires intelligence.
This is no less ambiguous, since you've not defined "adequate".
> How might a piece of software act adequately? By above reasoning it has to resist to termination.
That does not follow. "Termination" is the mechanism of natural selection, so all systems undergoing natural selection will biased to resist it (otherwise they'd be out-competed by those who do). If we use some unguided analogue of natural selection to create intelligent software, then there would certainly be such a bias.
However, my point is that unguided evolution is not the right way to create/increase intelligence. As soon as we try to influence the software's creation in any way, either through artificial selection criteria or by hand-coding it from scratch, we introduce new biases which may be far more powerful than the implicit "avoid termination" bias.
> But I think, when software starts to trick users and admin into not shutting them down, some threshold has been crossed.
That's called malware... ;)
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#89I'm only loosely familiar with the "general game playing" literature but I think learning the structure of the game is the interesting research problem here. An immediate experiment that I'd like to try would be: (a) Identify games considered similar (+maybe define what it means to be similar)...let's take Pong and Breakout as suggested (b) Trial and error run of one of the games to learn the action-reward structure…
This idea is known as "incremental problem solving". Some external oracle, eg. a parent, teacher or programmer, provides a series of problems, where each builds on ideas from the previous.
An example algorithm is the Optimal Ordered Problem Solver, which tries to solve each problem by generating simple programs. Successful programs get stored in read-only memory, then the system moves on to the next problem, generating programs which may call out to any previously-successful programs: http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/oops.html
Re: What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> evolution required a whole planet and billions of years before it stumbled on intelligence Everybody seem to agree humans are intelligent and stones not. You suggest at some point in time intelligence appeared out of nothing. Can you nail that point? One possible definition is: To act adequately in an environment requires intelligence. That rules out all non-living things because they don't act, but includes plants…
> Everybody seem to agree humans are intelligent and stones not. You suggest at some point in time intelligence appeared out of nothing. Can you nail that point? I suggest no such thing. It is a scale. I deliberately avoided the phrase "human-level intelligence", but any definition of AGI would do. Even so, if you want to count all life as "a little intelligent" then it still took a billion years of planet-wide chemi…
Try this: Surviving in an environment requires intelligence.
... or propose another. I tend to avoid all social, psychological definitions to end up with something measurable along the lines of Schrödinger's "What is Life?".
> That's called malware... ;)
I'm sure, stones think same about amoeba.