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Player of Games

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Re: Player of Games

#221

Post by randomswede »

7thaccount wrote: post #145
sdenton4 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I thought it was clear from the beginning of the book that no humans were even remotely competitive with any AI (including the main character) but that human game players were sort of an aesthetic throwback, like dog-racing in an era of F1 cars.

This was my understanding as well, but I might have read into it. The culture minds are in freaking hyperspace to get around lightspeed limitations on computations. He for sure can't beat that, but he could beat someone on another planet at their own game that he literally just learned in the year it took to get there. A game that permeates every aspect of their civilization. I do assume his drone could beat him as w…

One of the reasons that Contact (and Special Circumstances) have (some) humans[] around is for intuitive leaps. I can't say I recall which Culture book this is mentioned in, but it is, in one of them.

[] let's go with "human" as a general term for Culture biological citizens, it is probably a bit incorrect, but gets the point across.

Re: Player of Games

#222

Post by OneTimePetes »

thom wrote: post #27
7thaccount wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the protagonist wasn't nearly as talented as the culture AIs (even the ones that are not all that powerful)?

Is that clear from the text? Gurgeh supposedly perceives the result of the last game before the AIs so we’re led to believe he’s seeing deeper. Obviously he could have been wrong and still won. The AIs lied to and manipulated him the entire time so it’s hard to know, but it would seem a very odd weakness for an AI to have. I think Banks pretty quickly recanted on the subject of the Culture’s ‘referrers’ but I don’t t…

Remember the "ambassador" aka Zakalwe? They had boots on the ground and even set up interactions to prevent him getting to friendly/embedded with the "host" culture.

The whole thing was about to blow up anyway, so they brought in the Player of Games, to do it in a style that would prevent any recovery. Gurgeh was not there to defeat the empire, he was there to defeat the whole idea of the game being "holy".

He was the Jesse Owen shipped to hitlers olympics.

Re: Player of Games

#223

Post by ericd »

fxtentacle wrote: post #206
ericd wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm not an expert in this, but would something with a world model help, rather than depending on stochastic random action choices? It seems like it should be possible to learn that a frame sequence where you've been next to a bomb for 6 ticks is rapidly decreasing your expected score, and that your score would be significantly better if you weren't in line with the bomb pretty soon.

I'm in the process of attempting just that, with limited success. In my case, I trained a classifier that takes the current surroundings of the player unit and tries to predict that we'll gain an advantage in this segment of the game. I split the game into segments based on when the HP relationships between teams change. And gaining an advantage then means that you take more HP from the enemy team than what you and y…

Ah yeah the hp thing sounds a bit like what the OpenAI dota team did with their team scoring differential thing.

I’ve not built what you’re describing, just read related research papers, so I can’t really evaluate your plan, but I can wish you good luck!

Re: Player of Games

#224

Post by mrslave »

bewaretheirs wrote: post #181
chrisweekly wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSA: The "Culture" novels by Iain M Banks are fantastic and can be read in any order. "Player of Games" was the 1st one I read and still probably my favorite.

I keep hearing recommendations for the Culture books so I tried reading it recently and it just didn't work for me -- I gave up on it halfway through, which is rare for me.

Me too with Consider Phlebas. Then I hit the Alastair Reynolds novels pretty hard and now I'm stuck for new material. Dune is en vogue so perhaps that's the right read next? I really enjoyed Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky but couldn't quite get into A Fire Upon the Deep but it still sits on my shelf taunting me.

Re: Player of Games

#225

Post by TaupeRanger »

kadoban wrote: post #113
TaupeRanger wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvotes but honestly I agree. Who cares about board games? We should've moved on from this once we "solved" chess and Go. There are more important things and it's not remotely surprising that a computer can beat a human when there's a simple, abstract optimization problem to throw computing power at. Make it creative...now that's a challenge worthy of the top AI talent.

You haven't seen AlphaGo play Go then, it plays creatively as hell at points.

It might play creatively, but it doesn't create any useful knowledge by doing so, making it kind of amusing but not the kind of creativity anyone is really interested in.

Re: Player of Games

#226

Post by kadoban »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #225
kadoban wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't seen AlphaGo play Go then, it plays creatively as hell at points.

It might play creatively, but it doesn't create any useful knowledge by doing so, making it kind of amusing but not the kind of creativity anyone is really interested in.

It creates useful Go knowledge. What else could be asked of it?

Re: Player of Games

#227

Post by gwern »

fxtentacle wrote: post #207
gwern wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is true for pretty much all current deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Is that true? I was unaware that PPO, SAC, DQN, Impala, MuZero/AlphaZero etc would all automatically Just Work™ for hidden information games. Straight MCTS-inspired algorithms seem like they'd fail for reasons discussed in the paper, and while PPO/Impala work reasonably well in DoTA2/SC2, it's not obvious they'd converge to perfect pla…

You can mathematically prove for a lot of different algorithms (including PPO, DQN, IMPALA) that given enough experience with the game world, they will eventually converge to the optimal policy. It's just that the "enough experience" part might be so large that it's practically useless. If I remember correctly, the DeepMind x UCL RL Lecture Series proves the underlying Bellman equation in this video: https://www.yout…

I don't think you can prove that (forgive me if I don't sit through a 2h video). Those all are susceptible to the deadly triad, and AFAIK there are no convergence proofs of any kind for the big model-free DL algs, and it would've been big news if someone had proved that a real-world version of PPO/DQN/IMPALA does in fact converge in the limit. Sutton's book and earlier proofs only cover cases where you drop the nonlinear approximator or something.

(History stacking may turn POMDPs into MDPs, but I don't know if they handle the specially adversarial nature of games like poker. That's quite different from stacking ALE frames.)

Re: Player of Games

#228

Post by 7thaccount »

OneTimePetes wrote: post #222
thom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that clear from the text? Gurgeh supposedly perceives the result of the last game before the AIs so we’re led to believe he’s seeing deeper. Obviously he could have been wrong and still won. The AIs lied to and manipulated him the entire time so it’s hard to know, but it would seem a very odd weakness for an AI to have. I think Banks pretty quickly recanted on the subject of the Culture’s ‘referrers’ but I don’t t…

Remember the "ambassador" aka Zakalwe? They had boots on the ground and even set up interactions to prevent him getting to friendly/embedded with the "host" culture. The whole thing was about to blow up anyway, so they brought in the Player of Games, to do it in a style that would prevent any recovery. Gurgeh was not there to defeat the empire, he was there to defeat the whole idea of the game being "holy". He was th…

Yeah, of course the culture could just obliterate the empire militarily. I think only a few civilizations (pre ascension) could hold their own for awhile.

You bring up a good point about shattering the view of the game though.

Re: Player of Games

#229

Post by bewaretheirs »

pault wrote: post #198
bewaretheirs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing recommendations for the Culture books so I tried reading it recently and it just didn't work for me -- I gave up on it halfway through, which is rare for me.

Which one? They each have a unique feel and setting.

Player of Games (thought that was obvious from context).

Re: Player of Games

#230

Post by bewaretheirs »

Jordanpomeroy wrote: post #203
bewaretheirs wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing recommendations for the Culture books so I tried reading it recently and it just didn't work for me -- I gave up on it halfway through, which is rare for me.

They are a slow burn, but the ends always justify the means with those novels. If you really did make it 1/2 way, I’d encourage you to go back and finish reserve judgment.

Not going to pick it up again.

My reaction is perhaps summarized by the old quip: "This is not a novel to be lightly tossed aside. It should be thrown with great force.".

It wasn't any one thing but I eventually hit a point where continuing just wasn't worth it for me. There's too much else on my to-read shelf which is less likely to seriously annoy me.

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