Slashdot Mirror
Rules-Unknown Artificial Intelligence Competition
OOglyDOOde writes: "This link points to a competition being hosted by a company that makes research on artificial intelligence. The task? Build a program that can play a number of games whose rules are totally unknown -- and earn the best score while competing against various opponents. Your program is told the possible choices available, when it should make a move, what did the opponent do; and what was your score for the last turn. There are no entry fees yet there is a cash prize. Submissions can be done in various languages, or in Linux or Windows binaries." This is certainly one of the odder ones I've ever seen, but has interesting prizes (trip to Israel) and rules (fairly broad entry categories).
I took a statistics course at BYU. My professor, Dr. Tolley, with the help of his "31337" kids, built an AI system that played Quake. Each possible move was designated as a random variable, and each random variable was weighted according to its success in keeping the player alive and killing the other player. The code would randomly try different actions with the game interface (walk forward, fire weapon, duck, etc.), and then register what worked and what didn't. At first, the computer-controlled player would just stand there. After getting blown apart a few times, it would start jumping to the left, and then ducking, etc. Eventually, it "learned" that it had its greatest chance for survival if it immediately ducked and went behind a box. It then learned to wait until someone walked around a corner, and then it would fire its weapon in the direction of the corner. Finally, it learned that coordinates of the game contained the "respawning" positions, and upon fragging the opponent, it would run to the next respawning point and wait until the player showed up there, blowing him away upon entry into the game.
This code could be similarly adapted to any game, inasmuch as the code can register a table with all the possible moves provided by the interface. It doesn't even have to know what those moves do; it only needs to know if, by doing certain moves according the "state" (or the attributes) of the game, it gains points (or stays alive or whatever) or loses points. The moves are then given a distribution weighting factor. Then, the algorithm just needs to approximate the game state with the registered table entries, determine which moves have the highest "survival rate" based on the current game attributes, and then perform those moves.
Depending on the game, it may take a long time before the random variable distribution table gets populated to the point where the algorithm can make "intelligent" decisions, but it works nonetheless.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
And this is one of the reasons Minsky set back research on neural nets for 20 years...
Just because someone hates you idelogically, that's no reason to treat them like shit.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Bla bla. Politics. Bla.
Anyway, as an Israeli I can assure you that the
"situation" has some really low chances of
hurting any tourist. Fact: i'm taking the bus
on a daily basis and yet i'm still alive. And
I -live- here. So, really. The media just like
to over bloat things.
On the down side: Its freaking HOT. Dont get
here unless you're heat tolerant. I'd take
a trip to swiss instead at any time.
...for all I know the crazy Israeli army/government will use the code to write programs to further their inhumane agenda. Think about it for a second. Where should we move our tanks, guns, planes and other US Tax payer supported weapons to target the Palestinians.
Going through UN archives or resolutions, even the United Nations condemns Israel for taking the land by force the way they did. And what's more ridiculous, is that now they say "You palestinian's shouldn't fight us, we're ready to make peace on our Israeli terms". Ridiculous! That's like me walking into Taco's home and kicking his butt out and then when he fights back, I cry to all of Slashdot saying he is psychotic. And when that's over, I tell him that he can live in the mulch pile in the back which I sleep in his room.
I know this message will get moderated down to -1, and is it doesn't people will sit here an attack me. Both sides have done wrong, I just think the people who started it (Israeli's) should take their stuff and walk away. Didn't the holocaust help them realize anything? What's ironic is that the holocaust of 21st century is being conducted by the Israeli's and our US taxpayer money supports them with weapons!
Ultimate lameness...!
Look at chess as an example. This is like having a chess computer that has to learn the rules. Compared to playing chess (which is computable), learning the moves is relatively easy.
Wrong. Let's suppose this program gets a list of available moves every turn. How is it to even know the board is a 8x8 board and the relations between each square? How is it supposed to know the significance and difference between a king, queen, rook, knight, bishop and pawn? In order to play intelligently, it will have to learn that sacrifices can be a good thing, but is generally bad if you aren't guaranteed an advantage later in the game. That making one little mistake in your tactic/strategy can quickly lose you the game against a strong player.
Without assumptions you're really screwed. So it very much depends on the interface, how much and what information the program gets every turn. There'll always be some assumptions left too, as what you choose will always have some limitations.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
"I'll move my piece to square A17..."
:*BEEP* Sorry, but you lost!"
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Oh great, how lovely, an almost compleatly useless set of additional integer CPU instructions, and another product made to be AOLs biatch.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
GA won't win. If it's done beforehand, it will optimize itself for specific games. If it's done afterward, it will fall behind early and be unable to catch up.
After reading the guidelines to the contest, I figured I'd offer the following models/design specs for those interested in participating:
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
If you win, you can win a trip under the bomb in israel. And if you die in this second game, they keep the source.
Well I'm sure some places in Israelien territories are very fine and rather safe - but for one many interesting places are in Palestinian territories (and no tourist wants to be taken in a crossfire), and for two I would really hate to provide, with the money I would spend, support to a country who is organizing etchnic cleansing and conquest thru colonization. The same as I would not visit North Korea or Birmania.
From the detailed information on their web-site:
A round-robin tournament will be held to select the winner of the Learning Machine Challenge. All combinations of players will take part in all games, of which there will be between six and twelve.
As I see it, they plan to let every contestant play against every other, on 6-12 games, several thousand moves each.
Where will they find the time to do this if they get more than just a few dozens of entries?
Last I checked, democracy isnt perfect.
There are many other factors for why people choose who they choose. Keep looking at the shallow side, and you'll never get anywhere.
Not that you tried to, anyway.
PS:
Incase you didnt notice, we didnt fire a single shot against those "poor, innocent" people for months. And yet, they keep on shooting. When we do shoot, its rare, and in response to something they did. Very inhuman. I guess that we should stop responding at all and just sit back and get killed. Fun, isnt it.
And dont start with the "who did what first". When you get killed, it doesnt matter. When we tried to talk, they didnt stop shooting for a moment. During the peace process, they kept saying that "peace is just a cover! We will kill them all anyway!" in public radio and TV. But, its ok. They're palestinians. They are permitted to do it.
I don't claim to be an AI guru, but don't programs/computers live and die by rules? (Bad example: HAL in 2001. Rule: Complete Mission. Obstruction: Humans.) The AI could only adapt so much...
end communication
The point is not to decline playing against the other real programs, just for the fake progs to play to the best of their ability against everyone but you.
Sending ID will most likely mean making a commitment, but for long and somewhat stochastic games (which I have a feeling that we will be dealing with here), this early commitment will (hopefully) not be enough of a handicap for the fake progs. They will still get points (provided that your algorithm is any good in the first place).
The real program will only reply an ID string when it is statistically sure that its opponent is a "buddy", thus the real program gets the unfair advantage of getting a few/many easy wins that the programs made by the other contestants will not get, but sacrifices nothing. You will still need a good program to win. This is just how one could (if one were so inclined ;) give it that extra boost.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
If you're an American, it's called "cricket."
But with a game as complex as chess, for example, there is no mathematical way that the program could gather enough information over the course of a single game to make that kind of assessment.
Lose a queen and you never know what it is to not have lost a queen, for example.
Kevin Fox
something is intelligent when another intelligent being (i.e. a human) cannot tell if it's a machine he's communicating with, or another human
So for example, you aren't intelligent because I'm confident that you're a human not a machine?
A fantastic game for experienced players, but newcomers can sometimes be confused at the start.
It's played on the stations of the London Underground network. For example, I could start with Albright's Opening, *Regent Street*.
Anyone want to take me on?
Female Prison Rape in NY
I'm going for the easy answer: If my score is an even number the answer is yes. Otherwise my answer is no.
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
But they don't blow up sinagogues. If they did, and did it consistently, every single day, and if there would no way to single out those who did, then the FBI would go around arresting and if fired at, killing fundamentalist Christians. Which is exactly what IDF does. Palestinians excell at putting children in the front line before the gunmen and then blaiming israelis for using rubber bullets. The international community is fast to blaim israel for bombing a Hammas building because two children were killed as well as two heads of the hammas terrorist organisation, yet when US bombards Yugoslavian cities, it's ok, after all they are protecting peacefull kosovars. Well guess what, Israel is protecting the peacefull citizens of Israel. Our roads are not safe since this october, almost every day more than one shooting incident (that is by palestinians), but you will only hear about it when they succeed in killing more than 10 of us at one time (like the bombing in tel-aviv). But the fact that we are successfull in stoping them before they bomb us is somehow our guilt? I'd like to see you suggest some solution instead of bashing. What do you want us to do? In camp-david we gave it all, and they didn't take, nor suggested any alternatives. In Lebanon we retreated to the exact line the UN resolution requested, UN has confirmed it, yet the hizbollah continues it's attacks on Israel, and since then have kidnapped 3 israely soldiers (from israel's soil) and 1 citizen. It seems that even executing UN resolutions to their letters isn't satisfactory to the other side. Don't forget also, these lands you call occupied where occupied as a result of war that we didn't start nor wanted. In 1948 Israel accepted the division plan by UN, but was invaded by it's neighbour's armies. The result of that was that when war ended, Israel had more land than at the beginning, but arab countries have only themselve to blame for that. Palestinian refugees from 1948 were not accepted by arab countries and still don't have citizenship of the countries they reside in. All this in order to use them as a political card against Israel. Now palestinians want to create their own country, but want their diaspora to be settled in Israel! Don't you think that's a little bit contradictory? What would you said if with the creation of Israel, israel would demand that all countries from which Jews were expelled during the hollaucost (sp) would accept jewish refugees and grant them citizenship? Instead israel has accepted it's diaspora and embraced it within itself. The palestinians are persuing a separatist act, yet they complain that we don't let them in to work in Israel? Do you want independence or don't you? The world demands that Israel stops executing terrorists without trial, yet last week 3 palestinians who were suspected in aiding israel were shot by palestinian authority without trial, and another 3 were sentenced in 10-minutes trial to death. Do you complain about that too? Why don't you? To sum this long rant up: Please, if you don't understand the things you talk about, shut up. The issues at hand are more complex than they come through pictures on BBC or CNN. Also keep in mind, that palestinians don't let journalists to make a free coverage, and most pictures you see are shot by palestinian free-lancers, who despite being journalists, are not impartial, and can and do cut out whatever makes palestinians look bad.
True! Or, even better - bacteria!
;)
I remember that some few years ago some guys used bacteria to predict the stock market. apparently they are more susceptible to the miniscule trends humans tend to overlook. They really know how to adapt to beneficial environments, and, accordingly beat many an analyst.
However, with a doubling rate of over 20 minutes, they won't have a chance in Quake... Not even against Joe Schmoe with a 28.8k modem!
However in a slow, perhaps turnbased system they could be killers.
Sensmoral - that gaming competition has little to do with TrueIntelligence(tm). If one gets beaten by a gang of Streptococcus sp. it says very little indeed, but more perhaps on stock market analysts.
...was the other information on the AI site about how they are working on the Child Machine HAL. Can you teach them how to do Java? In that case I could "work" from home more often...
Will these programs be run in a sandbox? They're accepting user-submitted binaries, so I would hope so. To be completely fair, the submitted programs should be able to do nothing but read and write from stdin/stdout, otherwise they may do any number of things. Even if they are restricted like that, the judging program had better not having any buffer overflow vulnerabilities. ;-)
Somehow, I don't get the feeling that these people have planned this very thoroughly. There are other little things that don't quite seem right, too...
Try reading the post.
Imagine in chess where you scrifice a pawn to gain position - in that case your "score" that turn would be negative yet you would be able to gain a higher overall score later as a result. With only knowledge of the "score" for that turn, how can you decide when a sacrificial move might leave you better off?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Interesting idea, but I don't think it would be unfair, since according to the rules you can enter as many times as you want (don't even bother with friends, unless you want to). Also, I got the feeling from reading the site that programs are pitted against eachother one on one (I don't know for sure, perhaps this is another game rule that could change from game to game?). If this is the case, your "real" program might be subjected to other competitors' real programs and be unable to decline playing with them. Also, the judge program might not allow any identity information through until after your program makes a commitment. Still, assuming enough of the "fake" entries, it might still be possible to gain an advantage by dint of sheer numbers if you entered, say, a million times.
I suspect, if they ever try this contest again, they'll want to ponder that rule a bit more...
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
That is because some amount of randomness is necessary to get intelligent search algorithms out of local minima. This is why genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, for example, have seen success.
The first question that popped into my head was "How do we know what the opponents move means?"
I was under the misconception that at each turn in the game, the judge will inform the player of all possible moves (as in chess, checkers, or the like) but looking at the specification, it seems that the moves are detailed at the outset of the game, and then are available to each player at each stage in the game.
now the odd thing to me is the measure of 'state' in the game. Is the score that's returned after each move the current cumulative score, the score for that move alone, or what? Also, what is the goal of the game? It would be short-sighted to assume it's to amass the highest score. In effect, the score is just another input variable, along with the opponents move, which may or may not be useful for judging what is a good move or a bad move.
For example, if you were trying to make an algorithm to solve the A8 puzzle (the 'sliding tile puzzle' with 15 tiles and 16 spots), and the computer judged your score by totalling up manhattan distances to the goal state, that may or may not be a fair scale of how many moves away you are from winning in an ideal case.
The system is still underspecified. Without knowing what 'score' means, and whether it is an estimate or a deterministic function, then the project is pretty much a game of luck, and coding is not an effort of skill.
Kevin Fox
It's called Calvinball, and it's the sport of kings.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Actually, this sounds more appropriate for some sort of multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm. Anytime someone mentions actions, rewards and learning in the same sentance, the first thing that comes to my mind is reinforcement learning.
You can't send arbitrary strings. Read the webpage. You can only look at moves, and make moves when your asked, out of the list of legal moves you're given.
But you could adapt your idea to this situation. Simply have your "master" program know the internals of all your "slave" programs, so that it can identify a likely slave based on the first few moves. Since it knows the slave's internals, it can beat it 100% if it's actually a slave. If it deviates from the known slave behaviour, well then you need a real algorithm.
In this scenario, your slaves don't even have to suck. They can use the best algo you can muster, but the master prog will still beat them because it knows what they're thinking. You can even use the same algo in the master when it identifies a real opponent.
Dead simple to do this if you already have a half-decent algo. Someone want to try it? Easy 2K...
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Of course, there may be some connection between the prize and the game ("win a conflict where you've got no clue of the rules", that pretty much sums up the problems of both parties in the Middle East).
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
Mod that one up folks...
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Heh... Some years ago I was involved in some competitions in Denmark and Europe for high-school students ( programming ). Some challanges involed a bit AI knowledge - but each and everyone of the winning entries have used a random algorithm to solve the challanges, and still always had biggest success rate...
World is weird....
Oh, and I just remembered that the judge program can insert moves that are part of the game, but not initiated by your opponent. This means you don't know if the opponent made the move or if the judge did it. So you'll need some fuzzy matching on your identification algorithms... hmm. Maybe not so easy.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
at least one, chief!
I wonder what will happen if you let one of these entries loose on slashdot? Would you get intelligent posts, or intelligent trolls? Imagine such a program accumulating more karma than Jon Katz. That would be a boost :)
But seriously. How can one consider this contest artificial intelligence? It's not like the entries have to be intelligent. They just have to be logical and well designed, and good at pattern recognition.
Look at chess as an example. This is like having a chess computer that has to learn the rules. Compared to playing chess (which is computable), learning the moves is relatively easy.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Yes. It starts out with preconceptions, but you don't know what they are. The "right way" to do it is to have uniform weights, so you *know* that it has no preconceptions... but that means using a quite different learning algorithm. It's the difference between random and representative. If you flip a coin ten times, HHHHHHHHHH is just as common as HTHTHTHTHT, but only one is representative.
-- Brian T. Sniffen
Google, raging, or lycos?
Don't you think this could be used for piloting weapons ? The site is dead at this time so I can't get more insight. yours, Britney
Well the Palestinian have a clue about the whole thing. The Israelian can't win, as they are not facing an organised army but a population where every kid over 7 is a potential enemy. For Israel to win, they'd have to kill every Palestinian.
The Palestinian have nothing to loose, most of them are rather happy to die in this war, and the Israelian have everything to loose.
I thought it was called "presidential election".
I do not have a signature
What, me worry?
The entries had to be given in the form of a subroutine that played the next move (given the current score and the history). The judges were linking two of them together and run the resulting binary.
Of course, there have been an entry that looked in the stack and modified the scores.
But the greatest was one (IMHO) that fork()ed and returned one possible response in each of its child. At next turn, the one that did not make the point (ie: had top score), exit()ed.
Mind-blowing. Found the link
That program was the "Fork Bot"
Cheers,
--fred
> ...wait until the player showed up there, blowing him away upon entry into the game.
So that's where all those camping bastards came from!
Drinking will help us plan!
Sounds like an amusing thing to watch while it grows...
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Give me a woman's brain anyday!
Sincerely, Mike Bouma
> If I win, do I get a trip to the US? (see email address)
Furriners who win a trip to the US shouldn't come unless they also get a get out of jail free card.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Oh, I don't know... It's more like Taco is renting from Joe, who told him that he would be selling him the apartment. Meanwhile Joe promises the apartment to his cousin Frank, evicts Taco and gives it to Frank. Now Taco keeps coming back and leaving piles of burning shit on Frank's doorstep, and trying to sleep in his kitchen. At which point Frank starts beating him with a baseball bat. Neither side can claim that they are being mature about this, but the problem is that Joe is an ass, and was never held responsible for tooling them both around...
There are enough real, interesting problems out there to choose from; why pick some company's idea of a contest? Work on Go, write a nice chess player, do something interesting with data mining, etc.
Of course, playing as "badly as they can" implies the same knowledge of the game as playing well, if you want to do better than random chance. To play badly is every much as difficult an AI problem as playing well...
The real prog answers an ID string with something similar and voíla the fake entries becomes nice cooperators. (see my also my earlier post)
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
They give 3 samples, rock scissors paper , prisoners dilemma, and cooperation. The only way to gain advantage above random in Rock Scissor Paper is to collude with the other player for wins. The cooperation game gives points if the two players pick numbers sufficiently close to one another--again the only win vs random is to collude with the other player. Finally, the prisoners Dilemma has the odd property that the best score comes from colluding with the enemy. Can this be a coincidence? What are they aiming for here? See how many people are smart enough to write a bunch of programs that collude with themselves?
okay, wasn't a perfect example, but the real problem IS that the british promised Palestine to both the Palestinians and the Jews. So though the Jews were given the land, the Palestinians have a right to be pissed.
Sounds like it's time for a genetic algorithm plus a bit of matrix game theory.
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
"For the palestinians, there could be peace with the israelis alive. Sure, I bet some palestinians would be harassed, even if they are innocent of crimes (though I'm not sure there are any like that). Yet the palestinians never hesitate to take action that leads to their primary goal, which is the genocide of the israelis and other jewish people. Doesn't that say something to you?" ;-)
Making generalities about people is exactly the problem here... I have met plenty of Palestinians who don't want to kill the Israelis, and plenty of Israelis who don't want to kill the Palestinians.
Okay - I'm done. No more political crap from me
Pity I can not program computers. This looks like a nice challenge.
-- Cheers!
I mean how many real world CS people studying AI reads Slashdot?
Doing that and dumb enough to waste his time with this. Count me one.
--exa--
If this is a 2+ player competition and they're the right sorts of games (like the rock-paper-scissors game that it mentioned), whoever wins it might have to figure out a way to consistently beat the tit-for-tat algorithm.
Tit-for-tat is one of the dead simplest game playing algorithms, and collectively it's one of the most successful.
It's based on the rule of "always do what the other player did last move". Under most circumstances it's impossible for it to actually win a game because the other player is always one step ahead. But its strength is in winning tournaments.
While it always loses, it never loses by much. This is different from other algorithms which usually have about as many weaknesses as they have strengths and will usually flunk out in at least some trials.
If someone can beat it consistently in a tournament situation, they really will have accomplished something in AI. Of course, this whole thing depends on exactly how the rules are structured, the scoring system and the information available to the program.
If only God open sourced the brain...
"Wireless : LAN
1. If I win, do I get a trip to the US? (see email address)
2. I wonder whether the winner could visit me.
:-)
After reviewing the challenge rules, I see this challenge as a simple exercise in neural networks coding.
The challenge is so obscure that any entry submitted will have to deploy a very generic NN and a trainer. this basicly means that after enough training any entry would do sufficiently good at any simple game (such as scissors, rock, paper) but playing anything more complex than
that is shooting in the dark. The interface and the rules of the challenge themselves are too obscure.
If there is someone with a code that could win such uncertainty effectively and efficiently, he'd be stupid to submit it for $2000.
Then again I must give a person that can do something extraordinary as that some credit for not doing something that stupid.
Seems to me that since it is a round-robin for all contestants (the site was /.ed, but I saw another post claiming that this was the case), all you have to do is team up with a lot of friends and have them enter fake programs into the contest (i.e cheating).
These programs will start by identifying themselves with an "ID-string", consisting of, say, the first 10 replies (this can obviously be done generically even with unkown rules, just pick the moves randomly with the same seed). When my program sees this ID it replies a similar code. When the fake programs sees this, they start cooperating with my program (by playing as badly as they can muster). If the fake programs does not get this reply, they start playing as well as they can and will (since there will probably be large element of luck in each game) steal a considerable amount of points from the pool. The "real" program never risks anything since it never sends its own ID before being statistically sure that the opponent indeed is a fake.
This method was inspired by a similar trick in the famous Prisoner's dilemma game.
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
I took an AI class this year where we had a challenge to use PERL to design a Stratego-playing AI. One of the professors quickly wrote a script that moved a random piece a random direction (verifying the move was legal), and had a surprisingly high win %.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
Hopefully they'll throw in some human opponents, just for comparison sake.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
They are playing the STOCK MARKET. They buy stocks according to the various submissions, gradually weed out the bad performers, and end up making a pile, with which they can pay the prize and still have a tidy profit.
Wish I'd thought of it!
Infuriate left and right
http://google.com/search?q=orwant+EGGG+game+engine
Cool! I actually learned something on /. ....I am just really getting down with this field of AI especially Machine Learning, but I like what I am learning, hopefully I will be able to make a contribution......
Rob
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
Backprop - The backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks. "Brought neural networks back from the dead."-popular opinion
RBF - Radial Basis Function Neural Nets.
HMM - Hidden Markov Models(I don't know what they're for)
SVM - Support Vector Machine(latest hot thing,I still don't know why its so great)
SOFM - Self Organizing Feature Maps(another NN architecure)
ART - no idea here... Like Hal Cohen's Aaron?(the drawing program)
I would like to add that I think Computational Learning Theory(COLT) and other statistical approaches seem really promising and I think we are going to be seeing some really interesting stuff in the next 5 - 10 years(ok maybe 20).
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
Naive bayesian is one of the weaker methods.
Thanks,
--exa--
You are so very right. Got to keep my mouth tighter.
--exa--
I am going to guess that you are currently living in Israel. Thank you for providing an insiders look into what is really going on over there. It is a shame that people take the word of CNN, BBC, AP, etc.. as the ultimate truth. To those that would bash Israel for Genocide, or indiscriminate killing, or war mongering, perhaps you should learn some history: did you know that over 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands when Israel was created (Where are the calls for their compensation), lookup such things as Black September, the massacre of the Lebanese Christians in Damur, the closing of the Straits of Tiran (Closing an international waterway is an Act of War), the PLO charter is good read, as is the book From Israel to Damascus(which should shut up anyone claiming Sharon is responsible for Sabra and Chatilla, check out chapter 8). If you don't like history try current events such as the hypocricy of the world leaders at the G8 (condemn Israel for firing on Armed terrorists but yet using live ammo on unarmed protestors in Italy is OK), or that the UN finally admiting that it misled Israel about the kidnappings by Hizbollah (not only did they have one tape but there are three!!! and personal belongings such as blood stained uniforms (of which they will NOT return), no bias here just keep on moving), perhaps learning about the Palestinian media would be enlightening (calls of hate and violence are not uncommon). If sheeple persist is continuing their ingnorance there can never be peace because there will be no understanding.
Comaparing the main area of research for the company sponsering this competition, and the rules of the competition, I suspect they are going to try to use these bots to make some progress on the Turing test. They defined 'game' widely enough to consider conversation a game. The score is the reward/punishment - relevent and/or sensible responses are rewarded, etc. I suspect they want to give the machines thousands of possible moves, each representing a phrase, and then set them loose 'against' each other, seeing which one can score the highest on the conversation scale.
AI hasn't progressed in 50 years. Its a failure.
I'm one of those "chumps" that would say something like this. Quite frankly, "Artificial Intelligence" is an abject failure.
Just because there isn't "strong AI" yet doesn't mean the field has failed.
Ah, there we are. If you don't want your field to be called an "abject failure", then don't call it AI. If you want to say that pattern recognition has made some strides, say it. Or pick your particular problem. But when you use the words "artificial intelligence", then I expect intelligence created artificially. Not "very sophisticated algorithms".
Physics doesn't have a grand unified theory, medicine can't make people live forever, etc. & we don't consider those fields failures.
No. But comparing an AI scientist to a physicist is like comparing Aristotle to Einstein. Both brilliant people, both made huge contributions to their field, but immense differences in knowledge.
I'm not saying AI will never get there, but I think a dose of reality is needed here.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.