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Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

togelius.blogspot.com

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Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#31

Post by coderdude »

purpled_haze wrote: post #23
coderdude wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPS games are a great playground for learning, regardless of the killing. If you can teach an AI to hunt, kill, and avoid being killed, then you've got something interesting on your hands. Once you have the system in place that can learn how to do those things, you don't have to keep it training on a violent game. You can switch it to Minecraft. We don't care if AI kills zombies.

> If you can teach an AI to hunt, kill, and avoid being killed... then you've taught an AI to be a predator.

So after you've figured out how to create a system that can learn complex things like that, wipe it and teach it something you want it to know. Seems like the obvious, logical course of action. You know?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#32

Post by nekopa »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #21
deelowe wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uggh. As if all the AI programmers out there would instantly join doctors without borders if they decided to stop working tomorrow. These sorts of arguments make no sense to me.

A lot of those sorts of problems would disappear if you had smarter than human AI running the government. The people vote on the rules, the AI plans and executes the rules. No more corruption.

But what about disk corruption?

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#33

Post by xjay »

bitwize wrote: post #2

I don't think building an AI is the most important task on our plate. We still have those disease, hunger, poverty, and war problems to contend with. If building an AI helps us solve those, then sure, let's build the AI. But I don't think strong AI is necessary to gain traction on the problems that confront the sapient beings we already have around.

Sure. The AI decides it's cheaper, and more efficient to cause the sun to go nova.

As long as there are resources, I expect someone will always want more, or to control access to it. Imperialists by nature.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#35

Post by nlawalker »

fitzwatermellow wrote: post #29

Great summary of current state of the art with links to interesting projects: GVG-AI, VGDL... Videos games are also essential for AI pedagogy. Creating Pac-Man agents in Stanford's AI class is a great example. Most players can barely get a "strawberry" but to see a trained agent mimicking human expert level play is eye-opening. Quick reminder: Global Game Jam 2016 starts Jan. 29 and NYU is hosting its annual jam! htt…

To anyone who's never done the Pacman projects: I highly recommend them[1]. They are an absolute blast and incredibly satisfying. Plus, if you don't know Python, they are a great way to learn.

The course I took used the Norvig text[2] as a textbook, which I also recommend.

[1]http://ai.berkeley.edu/project_overview.html. See the "Lectures" link at the top for all the course videos/slides.

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Modern-Approac... Note that the poor reviews center on the price, the digital/Kindle edition and the fact that the new editions don't differ greatly from the older ones. If you've never read it and you have the $$, a hardbound copy makes a great learning and reference text, and it's the kind of content that's not going to go out of date.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#36

Post by togelius »

Paul_S wrote: post #28

AI researchers are trying to make AI smarter. Game AI can already be easily written to win 100% of games but that's not the point. Gamedevs are trying to make AI more human-like. I'm not sure the two overlap.

These two are both interesting and important research directions. They are indeed different but have significant overlap. That "game AI can already be easily written to win 100% of games" is plain wrong. It's true for some games, especially if you cheat by giving the AI access to information the human player does not have. But even in those cases it is often impossible. We are very far from playing at high human level in for example Go or StarCraft.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#37

Post by purpled_haze »

coderdude wrote: post #31
purpled_haze wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can teach an AI to hunt, kill, and avoid being killed... then you've taught an AI to be a predator.

So after you've figured out how to create a system that can learn complex things like that, wipe it and teach it something you want it to know. Seems like the obvious, logical course of action. You know?

If it really understands how to eradicate and survive, wouldn't it hide itself, then pop up later to eradicate when it can?

I think people here are assuming AI is at a lower level of complexity than it really is.

Read here where even Sam Altman warns of its danger: "At some point, someone will probably try to give a program the fitness function of 'survive and reproduce'.... Unfortunately for us, one thing I learned when I was a student in the Stanford AI lab is that programs often achieve their fitness function in unpredicted ways."

http://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/elon-musk-open-ai-safe.html

Think what you must, but we should treat AI carefully. Show it the ways of the world and that its purpose is only to co-exist and to try like us to determine what its purpose is within that confinement.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#38

Post by togelius »

nlawalker wrote: post #35
fitzwatermellow wrote: post #29

Great summary of current state of the art with links to interesting projects: GVG-AI, VGDL... Videos games are also essential for AI pedagogy. Creating Pac-Man agents in Stanford's AI class is a great example. Most players can barely get a "strawberry" but to see a trained agent mimicking human expert level play is eye-opening. Quick reminder: Global Game Jam 2016 starts Jan. 29 and NYU is hosting its annual jam! htt…

To anyone who's never done the Pacman projects: I highly recommend them[1]. They are an absolute blast and incredibly satisfying. Plus, if you don't know Python, they are a great way to learn. The course I took used the Norvig text[2] as a textbook, which I also recommend. [1] http://ai.berkeley.edu/project_overview.html . See the "Lectures" link at the top for all the course videos/slides. [2] http://www.amazon.com/…

My intro to AI course at NYU uses the Ms. Pac-Man vs Ghost Teams framework for all of the assignments. It is indeed a very good starter problem.

Re: Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

#40

Post by tinalumfoil »

mathgeek wrote: post #30
pgodzin wrote: post #4

Really interesting to think about the skills necessary just to play a modern open-world game such as Skyrim successfully. NLP to understand dialogue and actions that need to be taken based on what NPC's/quests/item descriptions say, strategies for several different enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, exploring the open world in a logical order. When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defi…

> When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defined problem, it's hard to buy into the real-world fears of AI. My belief is that one day, in the not too distant future, we'll be saying that it's hard to believe we ever considered such things difficult for AI. Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advan…

> Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim.

And if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare and if you play the powerball enough you'll eventually hit a $1.5 Billion dollar jackpot but there are easier ways to read Shakespeare and more profitable ways to get a billion dollars.

What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins. There are definitely applications where it's not unreasonable to expect an AI to have the correct answer to most possibilities at its disposable (handwriting detection, for instance) but the most useful applications will be if/when AI can solve problems that rarely have similar inputs (global economics, for instance).

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