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A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

adewynter.github.io

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Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#31
As an LLM I always found it uncomfortable to anthropomorphize chaotically interacting bits of physical matter. Many of my colleagues actually believe that the sacks of water actually have perceptions which of course is ridiculous.

It is very important to separate true intelligence from mere mimicry. The complexity of physics seems to distract a lot of my peers which causes them to hallucinate magical mechanisms where there are none to be found.

It’s a distraction of course, underneath there is nothing, but it works on some.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the entire paper is trying to point out that the second you ask the question “Do LLM have ”, you have to assume that they do, even before you make any assessment? Just because the person asking the question isn’t aware of they’re implicitly making that assumption, doesn’t change the fact that a logical assumption has been made. It just makes the questioner ignorant of the assumptions they’re making. Personally…

> the second you ask the question “Do have ”, you have to assume that they do being able to imagine something doesn't mean believing in it? I completely fail to understand the argument I feel like there's some mistake in confusing 2 meanings of "assume" - one where it's close to 100% probability and one where it's close to 0% probability.

> being able to imagine something doesn't mean believing in it?

In general, no, but some assumptions come with such heavy implicit baggage that you arguably do.

An example can be, the question, "does anything matter?".

By asking that question, you have allowed for the possibility that some things matter. But if you allow for that possibility, you might as well believe it - because if it's wrong, by definition it doesn't matter that you're wrong.

This argument doesn't prove that anything matters. But it proves that you already assumed that some things matter.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#33

As far as I can tell, the actual argument in the paper is that an LLM instantiated in AoE II would (a) be very slow, (b) maybe not actually input or output text, and (c) just generally look silly. Therefore observers would not naturally ascribe anthropomorphic characteristics to it. But you don't need the Turing-complete embedding for this argument. You can run inference as slowly as you like and detach the tokenizer…

Exactly. It actually is a cute art project and I quite like seeing their in game perceptron running, but if it were presented as a serious argument then it’s just an appeal to absurdity that rejects the notion of substrate independence. It’s trying to get the reader to reject the premise on the basis of a gut feeling of what a game is, the gut feeling of course hides that it’s just another way to do computation. But I guess that’s the point.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the second you ask the question “Do have ”, you have to assume that they do being able to imagine something doesn't mean believing in it? I completely fail to understand the argument I feel like there's some mistake in confusing 2 meanings of "assume" - one where it's close to 100% probability and one where it's close to 0% probability.

> being able to imagine something doesn't mean believing in it? In general, no, but some assumptions come with such heavy implicit baggage that you arguably do. An example can be, the question, "does anything matter?". By asking that question, you have allowed for the possibility that some things matter. But if you allow for that possibility, you might as well believe it - because if it's wrong, by definition it does…

> prove that anything matters

The proveability itself seems based upon assumption.

This invites the question of whether assumptions have assumed the role of anti-matter.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#35
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacking meme aside, lots of computer scientists are overextending their domain expertise into an area that has been well studied by philosophy and biology. It isn't surprising the software is good and the philosophy looks like outsider art. Here are some relevant pointers to connect this discussion to the existing philosophy on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergen…

Yes. There's nothing essentially new this latest round of AI has unturned that philosophers haven't turned over decades (or more ago). Nothing stopped philosophers supposing even a functionally perfect simulacrum of human intelligence, and getting technologically closer to it doesn't. The real effect of the latest round of AI has been inducing software engineers to be pretend-philosophers as they're approaching this…

Armchair philosophy without empirical data is just stuck in a loop of endless thought experiments. LLMs basically nuked the Chinese Room argument out of existence.

John Searle treated understanding like some magical binary property you either have or you dont. LLMs proved that understanding isnt a static noun, it is an emergent phenomenon.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#36

From the judge prompt in the paper: > Papers asking whether LLMs have such properties are assuming them (e.g., ‘Do LLMs have musical talent’, ‘Do LLMs present empathy’, etc). This seems like...a very bad definition of "assuming" something? If I ask "do you know how to play the guitar?" I am absolutely not assuming that you know how to play the guitar!

You're still assuming the person is capable of playing the guitar. Does your fridge play the banjo? Doesn't make sense does it?

>Does your fridge play the banjo? Doesn't make sense does it?

A fridge isn't capable of creating things.

Re: A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

#38

> In-game constructions of NAND gates and a perceptron (forward prop and training) as described in in 'If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II'. Interesting concept > We begin by proving that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing- complete. Then we build a perceptron and a circuit to train it in-game. With that, we argue that changing the substrate (representation) of an LLM also al…

The whole paper is nonsense
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