31–40 of 60 posts
I wonder how Deepmind will simulate game theory as it advances
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm assuming you're referring to something like this: https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/ipd/ I think we shouldn't confuse efficient strategies with the chosen strategies. What causes Moloch is the inability to see the big picture, to see outside of the self in the collective (maybe Buddhism has a point). An efficient strategy may very well be something we'd prefer, such as tit-for-tat. But is that the strateg…
> Looking at the long history of evolution, I'd say no. This entire lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology is worth watching from the beginning, but I've linked to a moment where Sapolsky describes tit-for-tat strategies arising in animals. First example: Vampire Bats. []: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Oa4Lp5fLE&feature=youtu.be...
Evolution defaults to aggression as that is how it squeezes out fitness, and cooperative behavior is continually at odds with that and only seems to survive on one level up every so often, where evolution just starts treating it as giant agents anyway and the cycle starts again at a higher level. Similarly, we humans still have countries and borders and are only cooperating one level up. Cooperation is still merely being used as a survival tool, rather than an end in itself.
I.e., two people working together are working against another two people, those people if they somehow manage to combine are working against another collective, multiple collectives may combine and then work against other collective, etc... such developments may potentially be worse than just individuals fighting each other.
Similar to the idea that in a first contact situation, there may be an advantage in shooting first, and that often also implies only one iteration. I think shooting first is the default, and needs to be actively fought against.
Cooperation is not the default or preferred state for evolution, even though it's more efficient. To get there, it takes a lot of suffering and bloodshed. A few thousand years AI-caused suffering before it figures out that cooperating is useful more than one level up (if it ever does, as humans have failed so far) is not really what I have in mind when I talk about cooperative ethics. Cooperative ethics should be fundamental, not derived from short-term RoI computed in the moment.
Whenever I think I've finally gotten a handle on the state-of-the-art in AI research, they come up with something new that looks really interesting.
They're now training deep-reinforcement-learning agents to co-evolve in increasingly more complex settings, to see if, how, and when the agents learn to cooperate (or not). Should they find that agents learn to behave in ways that, say, contradict widely accepted economic theory, this line of work could easily lead to a Nobel prize in Economics.
Very cool.
Is it just me, or is this article extremely light on content? The core of it seems to be > sequential social dilemmas, and us[ing] artificial agents trained by deep multi-agent reinforcement learning to study [them] But I didn't find out how to recognise a sequential social dilemma, nor their training method.
Don't expect any crazy deep insights, but it's a useful read if you want to set up a similar experiment or understand the research methodology.
In a game where you are given the choice of killing 10,000 people or be killed yourself, which is the most rewarding outcome?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not if laser guns are a part of the race. Then it's just competitive.
If the laser gun is not part of the race, it's cheating (at best). I don't understand this nitpicking. Of course a gun is an aggressive tool. "Aggressive" and "competitive" are not mutually exclusive.
It's difficult to characterize that as aggression, especially if the system has no built in notion of harm or other-like-me.
That is what is actually scarier: Violence as paperwork.
Not entirely spawned by this article, but the whole genre and some other comments on HN by other users: I wonder if part of the "mystery" of cooperation in these simulations is that these people keep investigating the question of cooperation using simulations too simplistic to model any form of trade. A fundamental of economics 101 is that valuations for things differ for different agents. Trade ceases to exist in a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cooperative ethics arise immediately in the Prisoner's Dilemma merely by adding an unknown number of iterations to the game. The most efficient strategy is a version of tit-for-tat.
I'm assuming you're referring to something like this: https://egtheory.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/ipd/ I think we shouldn't confuse efficient strategies with the chosen strategies. What causes Moloch is the inability to see the big picture, to see outside of the self in the collective (maybe Buddhism has a point). An efficient strategy may very well be something we'd prefer, such as tit-for-tat. But is that the strateg…
I would say we have a demonstrated ability of seeing the big picture, and a pretty good track record of making it work.