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Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#91
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could flip your question around: Considering what a neuron actually does, shouldn't the default position be that the brain is a computer?

No, because you’re being reductive. Biological organisms are clearly not like silicon computers. Maybe biologist come up with the next big break through. I mean, if you want to match an organically grown organism ...

Is it clear that they're not alike? In the end it's all information and data being processed, whether by silicon or neural cell. What difference does the medium make to the end result?

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#92
post #31

> Finding a diamond in Minecraft takes many steps - from cutting trees, to making tools, to exploring caves and actually finding a diamond. Sounds like a simple state machine. Don't they program objectives into their agents? Or are they relying purely on training?

The agent only observes the first-person view in pixels, a compass angle, and a dictionary of inventory items [1]. So any solution would need to have a significant computer vision component.

[1] http://minerl.io/docs/tutorials/first_agent.html#taking-acti...

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#93
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a strong sense, this implies ML is not "intelligent" in any conventional sense of the word. I don’t know why people have so much faith in ML and AI. Considering what a CPU actually does, shouldn’t the default position be one of skepticism? It’d be truly amazing if you can make a machine intelligent in the human sense by merely coming up with a clever algorithm.

Or we could flip your question around: Considering what a neuron actually does, shouldn't the default position be that the brain is a computer?

Every advanced tech has been used as a metaphor for how the mind works. People used to think the brain worked like a piston engine. Now people think the brain is like a computer. Some people also think we are a network ala the internet of biological persons. Lots of artists think in images. Some people see the brain as an evolving story. The people who have any idea how the brain works are those that have been studying it for decades, I would be interested in those metaphors.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The trend in machine learning right now is to try and solve problems "from scratch" by training "end-to-end", which means without any prior knowledge. In a strong sense, this implies ML is not "intelligent" in any conventional sense of the word. What little we have of understanding of learning and intelligence in the scope of humans strongly implies that drawing parallels with solutions to other tasks, building on…

> In a strong sense, this implies ML is not "intelligent" in any conventional sense of the word. I don’t know why people have so much faith in ML and AI. Considering what a CPU actually does, shouldn’t the default position be one of skepticism? It’d be truly amazing if you can make a machine intelligent in the human sense by merely coming up with a clever algorithm.

The conversation around artificial intelligence is more of a call to action for human intelligence to figure out what we need to do and how wield ML than it is a description of the fundamentals of the computing. Even if the results are mediocre in the extreme, you can bunch together a huge amount of social and business change under that banner. I'd argue that's why people have faith in AI not because of what a computer can do, but because it is a call to faith in humans ourselves to integrate the technology and all implicated changes to it's maximum potential.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#95
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human can learn something through a fairly small amount of specific knowledge via written, verbal, etc instruction. All the data and the training process together are very clunky in comparison. IE, an inability to be taught by others is a serious limitation to say the least.

> A human can learn something through a fairly small amount of specific knowledge via written, verbal, etc instruction. This demands the mastery of language which is a very high bar. Most animals haven't achieved this, so I think if you expect to get a computer to learn this way before being able to reason as well before you consider it having intelligence, you would also have consider most animals not having intelli…

> This demands the mastery of language which is a very high bar. Most animals haven't achieved this

Then avoid language as medium. Many animals can learn from being shown an action once and apply it to themselves.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#96
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The trend in machine learning right now is to try and solve problems "from scratch" by training "end-to-end", which means without any prior knowledge. In a strong sense, this implies ML is not "intelligent" in any conventional sense of the word. What little we have of understanding of learning and intelligence in the scope of humans strongly implies that drawing parallels with solutions to other tasks, building on…

Tranfer learning is a form of this, where you train the first half of a neural net over a huge set of data, then take a much more specific task and train just a bit more by adding some layers, and you get great sometimes industry leading results. Look up Google's BERT project, trained generically on English texts and then you can reuse that part in many different tasks like sentiment analysis or entity recognition or…

> as a single developer

I think you are out of luck already. Even with transfer learning, retraining BERT to fit a larger dataset takes ages even on an RTX 8000. A single state-of-art experiment/training run at Facebook now costs 7 figures. The age of individual SOTA ML researcher/developer is over.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#97
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously, I'm starting to think turn based strategy games like Civilization, etc, will be the last to get any attention. Why? I don't think the answer is technical. A good AI for a game like Civilization would have knowledge of human social concepts like honor and vindictiveness, which are both concepts problematic to pin down. The definitions of concepts like these are fluid, they change with the times and societ…

> if you're shooting for human-like behavior You're not though, you're just trying to build a bot that can win the game.

Yep. Just beat a human 1v1 half the time. No AI can do it - none I've seen.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#98
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we could flip your question around: Considering what a neuron actually does, shouldn't the default position be that the brain is a computer?

No, because you’re being reductive. Biological organisms are clearly not like silicon computers. Maybe biologist come up with the next big break through. I mean, if you want to match an organically grown organism ...

Then at the very least, you should be able to simulate a biological brain, neuron by neuron, and get an intelligent computer that way. If you agree that's possible, you also have to consider whether it's the most efficient approach -- plausibly special algorithms could be invented that get the same intelligence at a fraction of the computing power.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#99
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human can learn something through a fairly small amount of specific knowledge via written, verbal, etc instruction. All the data and the training process together are very clunky in comparison. IE, an inability to be taught by others is a serious limitation to say the least.

Perhaps we can learn from small data, perhaps that’s an illusion. How much of our mind is hard-wired by our genes, our genes being a very slow-learning form of intelligence? Or, when we see “one” example of a new animal (for example), do we see a single picture? Or do we see it moving for about a second? Effectively multiple images? And, having previously learned a general model for physics, stereoscopic vision, and…

It's certainly worth keeping in mind the limitations that you describe and human's learning activity is certainly not as the rationalist intuition. But to take these limitation as entirely characterizing human activity seems bend the stick too far the other way and fly in the face of the many ways humans have modified their environment and adapted to those modifications and fairly often learned with only a few examples. And sure, plausibly a fair portion of those quick adaptation involve reworking basic facilities like vision. The whole thing is consistent with the neocortex sitting on top of the rest of brain and serving as a means to rewire it.

Re: Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped

#100

It's a weird thing to somehow think that an AI with only 4 days of training data should somehow outperform even a human child, which has a decade or more of imitation learning experience. A human doesn't come to minecraft "knowing nothing", like the machine learning programs in this challenge. They already know basically everything there is to know in order to perform task-oriented goal planning and only need to focu…

> with only 4 days of training data so 4 days to train their AI and not 4 days of training data.. on the data which was "60 million frames of recorded human player data"

My bad: they got 2 weeks of footage. Other than a clerical error, of course, this changes nothing about the fact that that's nowhere near enough data unless you've already cracked general AI.
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