Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EURISKO Lives

blog.funcall.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: EURISKO Lives

#31

Post by Phiwise_ »

radomir_cernoch wrote: post #18
radomir_cernoch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. I'm really baffled by such statement and genuinely curious. How come that studying GOFAI as undergraduate and graduate at many European universities, doing a PhD. and working in the field for several years _never_ exposed me to EURISKO up until last week (thanks to HN)? I heard about Cyc, many formalism and algorithms that related to…

For that reason, a comparison between GPT 2 and EURISKO seems funny to me. I discussed ChatGPT with my yoga teacher recently, but I bet not even my IT colleagues would have a clue about EURISKO. :-)

So? There's a real possibility DART has still saved its customers more money over its lifetime than GPT has, and odds are basically 100% that your yoga teacher and IT colleagues haven't heard a thing about it either. The general public has all sorts of wrong impressions and unknown unknowns of facts that I don't see why they should ever be used as a technology industry benchmark by anyone not working in the UI department of a smartphone vendor.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#33

Post by pfdietz »

pfdietz wrote: post #25
KineticLensman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It got a lot of kudos for winning a multi player naval wargame by building a bizarre but successful fleet that exploited all the loopholes and quirks in the rules.

Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron Traveller was (and is) a space-based RPG, although the original publisher is long out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game)

TCS itself: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/adventure-5-tril...

Re: EURISKO Lives

#34

Post by thom »

api wrote: post #26
thom wrote: post #13

Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth. I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided b…

> a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria. There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment cr…

Perhaps we can disagree on the shape of the curve, but it seems likely that ever more capable AI will enable ever more serious harms. Absolutely true that we should counter those harms in the present and not fixate on a theoretical future, but the medicine is much the same either way.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#35

Post by KineticLensman »

PaulHoule wrote: post #28
KineticLensman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it had at least one small (?) purely defensive boat that couldn’t be destroyed by typical weapons so its parent fleet couldn’t be defeated. It wasn’t like a modern drone swarm

It makes me think of the battles in Doc Smith’s Lensman series where the Galactic Patrol would develop a game-breaking fleet formation to use against Boskone in every major naval battle.

Ah yes, probably need to re-read them. I remember how virtually every book introduces a new super weapon that becomes part of the standard arsenal in the next, all the way up to entire 'negative matter' planets that are fired out of subspace (can't recall the in-universe name) at the planets hosting your opponent's base.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#36

Post by lisper »

thom wrote: post #13

Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth. I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided b…

> the combination of the two still seems worth investigating

This.

Back in the late 1980's and early 90's the debate-du-jour was between deliberative and reactive control systems for robots. I got my Ph.D. for simply saying that the entire debate was based on the false premise that it had to be one or the other, that each approach had its strengths and weaknesses, and that if you just put the two together the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. (Well, it was a little more than that. I had to actually show that it worked, which was more work that simply advancing the hypothesis, but in retrospect it seems kinda obvious, doesn't it?)

If I were still in the game today, combining generative-AI and old-school symbolic reasoning (which has also advanced a lot in 30 years) would be the first thing I would focus my attention (!) on.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#37

Post by PaulHoule »

KineticLensman wrote: post #35
PaulHoule wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me think of the battles in Doc Smith’s Lensman series where the Galactic Patrol would develop a game-breaking fleet formation to use against Boskone in every major naval battle.

Ah yes, probably need to re-read them. I remember how virtually every book introduces a new super weapon that becomes part of the standard arsenal in the next, all the way up to entire 'negative matter' planets that are fired out of subspace (can't recall the in-universe name) at the planets hosting your opponent's base.

These are all on the Canadian Gutenberg.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#38

Post by adw »

lisper wrote: post #36
thom wrote: post #13

Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth. I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided b…

> the combination of the two still seems worth investigating This. Back in the late 1980's and early 90's the debate-du-jour was between deliberative and reactive control systems for robots. I got my Ph.D. for simply saying that the entire debate was based on the false premise that it had to be one or the other, that each approach had its strengths and weaknesses, and that if you just put the two together the whole w…

People have advanced that argument a lot, and it's often worked for a short while; then the statistical models get better.

Chess was a game for humans.

It was very briefly a game for humans and machines (Kasparov had a go at getting "Advanced Chess" off the ground as a competitive sport), but soon enough having a human in the team made the program worse.

But at least the evaluation functions were designed by humans, right? That lasted a remarkably long time; first Stockfish became the strongest engine in the world by using distributed hyperparameter search to tweak its piece-square tables, then AlphaZero came along and used a policy network + MCTS instead of alpha-beta search, then (with an assist from the Shogi community) Stockfish struck back with a completely learned evaluation function via NNUE.

So the last frontier of human expertise in chess is search heuristics, and that's going to fall too: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494.

The common theme with all of this is that the stuff which we used before are, fundamentally, hacks to get around _not having enough compute_, but which make the system worse once you don't have to make those tradeoffs around inductive biases. Empirical evidence suggests that raw scaling has a long way to run yet.

Re: EURISKO Lives

#39

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
api wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria. There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment cr…

> Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? Trivialities Annoyances Immediate harm X-Risk |------------------------------------------------------| \----stuff you mention-------/ \---stuff Eliezer------/ wrote about > The crackpot "hard takeoff" hysteria only distracts from reasonable discourse about these risks and how to mitigate them. IDK, I feel endless hand-wringing about copyright and deepfakes distract from risks of ac…

[deleted]

Re: EURISKO Lives

#40

Post by adw »

api wrote: post #26
thom wrote: post #13

Up until about GPT 2, EURISKO was arguably the most interesting achievement in AI. Back in the day on the SL4 and singularitarian mailing lists, it was spoken of in reverent tones, and I’m sure I remember a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth. I suspect its achievements were slightly overblown and heavily guided b…

> a much younger Eliezer Yudkowsky cautioning that Doug Lenat should have perceived a non-zero chance of hard takeoff at the moment of its birth Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously? This stuff is comparable to the "LHC micro black holes will destroy Earth" hysteria. There are actual concerns around AI like deep fakes, a deluge of un-filterable spam, mass manipulation via industrial scale propaganda, mass unemployment cr…

> Why is Yudkowsky taken seriously?

People like religion, particularly if it doesn't affect how they live their life _today_ too much. You get all of the emotional benefits of feeling like you're doing something virtuous without the effort of actually performing good works.

Post reply on HN