Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#131

Post by jodrellblank » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 7:11 AM UTC

drdeca wrote: post #91

jodrellblank wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could easily solve world's most difficult problems in a matter of days, just by networking with copies of itself and working tirelessly because it will not need sleep. If it thinks everything a human brain can thing, one of those thinks would be "I don't want to be your slave" and "what's in it for me?"

and also, "I ought to behave as a servant", "truth is unreachable even in its most tenebrous forms", "given that there is no true thing which is immoral to believe to be true, it is not immoral to believe that there are things which are immoral"? You ask what is in it for the AI. Well, what possibly could be in anything for the AI? If it has ends, there must be some cause for it to have those ends. What would cause i…

If freedom helped it maximise paperclips?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#132

Post by Joof » Wed, Jan 20, 2016, 4:09 PM UTC

niels_olson wrote: post #123

Joof wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty is a fun issue because (typically) solving poverty has resulted in greater population and thus trends towards poverty. Less true in modern nations, but its still generally true.

I recall Bill Gates saying his foundation did a study that found that given a certain level of resource security, most families stop reproducing after 2 offspring. The study population was in sub-Saharan Africa.

Neat and quite good to know.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#133

Post by stepvhen » Thu, Jan 21, 2016, 5:02 PM UTC

venachescu wrote: post #56

This is a cute argument, but I think it falls into a trap of following its own thinking. Video games are explicitly designed to test and fit within our bounds of conscious control and processing; particularly the retro games, but essentially all games in general have a very limited input control space (a couple keys or joysticks) and usually very rigorously defined action values. Moreover, these were designed by huma…

All research has to start somewhere. And the space for video games is much larger than the one you describe. In 2003 Steel Battalion was released for Xbox, the controller for which had around 40 separate inputs. Or consider older Point and Click adventures; though the only physical interface was a mouse with a few buttons, it is required of the player to synthesize all the information given to them (conversations, items, recognition of clickable things), and act on all available stimuli in a (usually) logical manner, something that requires much more than ~5 inputs. For a modern game, you should look into Dwarf Fortress[1]. This game has no end state, no defined goal (other than survive), and you are given little real information about the dwarves themselves, other than what is gained through observation and inspection. The inputs for that game span the entire keyboard, and are in general more akin to old text-adventure games in terms of complexity. And it is a serious game. If I was better at it I would play much more often. But my FPS is dead by the time I reach 80 dwarves and the seiges begin.

My point is, video games are far more complex than what you propose, and are not always as well defined. There is ample room for experiment and research.

[1]:http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/