I didn't even know about the book until I read the comments here, I thought it was a reference to the Grimes song. Funny coincidence the song and the engine would appear so close in time to one another.
Player of Games
91–100 of 242 posts
Re: Player of Games
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
No he is not, but AIs are not allowed in the competition the story centers around.
Near the end of the competition, as he is deep in his analysis, the light craft AI gives up on helping him since it gets overwhelmed. Granted it's not a full Culture Mind (kinda hazy, been a while) but still a point for the meatbag.
I think the main character can be so strong at the game by the end because of his immersion in Empire culture. The ships AI would likely be at least as strong with the same experiences. Plus, as you mention, the ships AI is not smartest AI around.
Re: Player of Games
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty amazing book. I wish I could play a board game like that as well.
I second this, it was excellent. I've only read a few Banks books, but this was my favorite.
I started with Consider Phlebas but stopped because it seems too slow for me.
Does it get better in the later chapters?
Re: Player of Games
#94If you are interested in this, I maintain a list of boardgame-solving related research at https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research , with sections for specific games. This looks really interesting. It would be a good project to test this against a general card-playing framework to easily test it on a variety of imperfect-information games based on playing cards.
I tried my hand once or twice at (re-)implementing board games [0], so that I could run some common "AI" algorithms on the game trees. What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases. Do you, or somebody else, have any reco…
If you’re doing it for fun, one option is to start with a simplified version of the game. It’s faster to implement and faster to run. And you’ll get insights you can apply to the full game.
That’s what I did when I applied RL to Dominion, because the complexity of the game depends heavily on the cards you include! See part 3 of https://ianwdavis.com/dominion.html
Re: Player of Games
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this, it was excellent. I've only read a few Banks books, but this was my favorite.
I started with Consider Phlebas but stopped because it seems too slow for me. Does it get better in the later chapters?
It does, but IMO it's probably worth reading The Player of Games or Use of Weapons before it anyway. With the exception of perhaps Surface Detail, none of the Culture books rely on any others. Consider Phlebas gives a good view of The Culture from "outside" (the perspective of the Idrians) but is quite slow.
Re: Player of Games
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this, it was excellent. I've only read a few Banks books, but this was my favorite.
I started with Consider Phlebas but stopped because it seems too slow for me. Does it get better in the later chapters?
If you find Consider Phlebas too slow, try Excession before giving up on Banks.
Re: Player of Games
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
You often don't need anywhere near the amount of compute in these papers to get similar performance. Suppose you're a business that needs to play games. Most people seem to think that it's a matter of plugging in the settings from the paper, buying the same hardware, then clicking a button and waiting. It's not. The specific settings matter a lot. But my main point is that you'll get most of your performance pretty r…
My personal experience was the opposite. I'm currently trying different approaches for building a Bomberman AI for the Bomberland competition that was discussed here on HN a few weeks ago. "IMPALA with 1 learner takes only around 10 hours to reach the same performance that A3C approaches after 7.5 days." says the paper, but I can run A3C on a cheap CPU-only server but to get that IMPALA timing, I need to spend a lot…
Not an expert, but I believe many papers on other video games make a single decision for the next X frames at once, possibly including a delay factor that governs exactly when to act. I think OpenAI’s Dota2 agent does this.
Re: Player of Games
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I second this, it was excellent. I've only read a few Banks books, but this was my favorite.
I started with Consider Phlebas but stopped because it seems too slow for me. Does it get better in the later chapters?
Consider Pheblas wasn't the best in my opinion. Player of Games is my favorite, but some of the other later ones are good.
I enjoy the settings and the concept of the Culture more than the plotlines.
Re: Player of Games
#99I really like seeing references to the Culture series when naming things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
I think it is also a reference to "PogChamp", although it's disappointing that PoG apparently wasn't evaluated against the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) corpus of Atari 2600 games.
much more refined to think a spam of "POG!" stands for Player of Games when reading twitch chat
Re: Player of Games
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sad fact: Lee Sedol retired after AlphaGo defeated him.
3 years after...
Here's what Lee Sedol said when he retired:
> With the debut of AI in Go games, I've realized that I'm not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20191127004800315
He'd been playing Go professionally for 24 years. I never said he ragequit. He's too great a man to do something like that. Lee instead apologized for his losses, stating "I misjudged the capabilities of AlphaGo and felt powerless" while emphasizing that the defeat was his own and "not a defeat of mankind". I imagine being the Hector of humanity is quite a burden to bear. His professional ratings then took a dive for a few years https://www.goratings.org/en/history/ before he announced his retirement. To this day he remains the only human being who's ever won a single game against AlphaGo.