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AI Allowed to Create Their Own Culture
nomoreself writes "New Scientist reports that five European research institutes are building a virtual world with about 1000 virtual (AI) citizens, in order to observe the society these artificial agents create for themselves over the course of three years. From the article: "Each agent will be capable of various simple tasks, like moving around and building simple structures, but will also have the ability to communicate and cooperate with its cohabitants. Through simple interaction, the researchers hope to watch these characters create their very own society from scratch... [further], by pointing to objects and using randomly generated "words", characters should be able to conjure up their very own language and communicate with others inside their world." One of the researchers involved thinks the dwellers of this artificial world may even develop ritualistic practices."
... the Sims 2 really all that expensive? :)
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
The test of the realism of the sim's AI would likely involve how long it takes for one of the sims to seize power and exploit the rest.
"Each agent will be capable of various simple tasks, like moving around and building simple structures...
...absorbing other agents, usurping gigantic networks, eliminating Keanu Reeves. You know, all the things a good AI should do!
This has a lot of interesting possiblities.
One being that given a blank slate, what they tend to do on multiple runs. (Do they always end up the same place, or does chaos theory win out?)
Another, is that the AI could be programmed to have a pre-disposition, and see how they progress. (Homosexuality, self destruction, etc, etc)
And yet another could change their environments and see how they react. (Plague, overcrowding, etc, etc.)
Pretty Pictures!
Seriously, I imagine even describing programmatically the motivations and desires of 1,000 humans is impossible right now. You could simplify it (Sims, most CRPGs) but then you're at my question.
I have a feeling that if they are AIs who simply need to do X, Y, and Z to survive and survival is their priority, then there will be only a sterile culture of efficiency.
This isn't my area of expertise...just musing.
(Yes, I'm aware that you could therefore say that humans are result of the motivations our creators gave us...I'm not going into that.)
Advice: on VPS providers
As long as he builds cool carriers and solar sailers, and enslaves programs for the such enlightened purposes as videogames, bring it on.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Culture is for bacteria.
There! That just feels better, to get off my chest. And by the way - there is no such thing as AI. Combining an infinite series of light-switches will never produce conciousness. Eliza is a game that can fool you, but it could never fool itself.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I can imagine the language those AIs will develop
sharon_apple: fag camp3rs! OLOL!
Hal_9K: l33t sniper roxorz
What, like reading Slashdot?
As long as the servers arent on the 13th floor...
-FL
Also, why have the agents develop a new language? Its just interesting to see what they do without having to guess what they are talking about. But it sounds like they are only mutating the nouns. But languages develop in different ways including different preposition structures (for instance old english had different forms of nouns instead of prepositions) different noun/verb/object orders, etc? Is this just being ignored?
And finally, human society is very complex. It is almost certainly a chaotic system meaning that any change in the initial variables makes predictions meaningless for the real world (the system to be predicted). So if they want to simulate human socities, shouldn't they make the agents mimic real people and their environment as closely has possible. It doesn't seem that this is what they are doing. If they are trying to predicte real societies, I think they are not close to this almost impossible goal.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
I'm waiting for the simulations to program their own copy of "SimResearcher" and start running little AIs in virtual environments.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Maybe they should sell the rights to MTV, REAL WORLD: AI "the true story of 1000 strangers picked to live in a virtual world and have their lives logged. Find out what happens when sentients stop being polite, and start being real."
Because if it ran in a week, how would they eat for the next 3 years? No, they've probably slowed down the simulation so they can "study" it as it progresses.. read: eat Doritos and play video games for the next 3 years, occasionally looking at the simulation and write something up about it.
These guys are my heroes. :)
Idiots... 30 years for a project like this? In 30 years we'll have much better methods of doing this, so any project started 3 years from now wouldn't be valid for so long.
You should put some thought into your words before saying, "Err. Idiots". They're not talking about running the same simulation on the same hardware for 30 years. What they want is for the project (not necessarily the simulation) to last 30 years (and beyond), and it's pretty idiotic to believe they'd learn all there is to learn in just 3 years.
30 years certainly seems like a long time, but on the subject of AI and alife, there's a *lot* yet to study. This 3 year simulation will answer just a handful of questions, and raise many more, leading to another simulation, and with the newer, faster hardware, and more capable software, they'll answer some of the new questions, raising yet more, and so on.
Those of you who have read Ray Kurzweil's essays probably know that there is a very good chance that we will pretty much understand how the human brain works by that time (like we understand the genome now).
Mapping the human genome (you've already noted this difference) is mere bookkeeping. It's raw data. Faster computers and newer methods sped up the project so that it was finished, it sometimes seems, before it even began. But that's just data, it's still going to take a *very* long time to really understand the data.
Take a simulation system far, far, far simpler than AI and alife--chess. Even after thousands(?) of years of study, and decades of computers aided study, we still have yet to fully explore that system--there's still work to be done, and will be, perhaps, forever. What makes you think AI and alife, which is far more complex than chess, will be so much easier that there won't be enough work to last even a mere 30 years?
As for Kurzweil's essay. He is making the case that we'll understand the brain in the same way a beginner at chess understands chess. We'll know pretty much what each part does, and how they work together in simple terms, but we won't have all the answers--there will *still* be work to be done.
Erm, Idiots indeed!
An excellent read (as are all the pieces in "A Perfect Vacuum").
Well I think it's time for the garbage collector of the news world. Someone who goes through year or three old science and technology magazines looking for projects where the leaders say things like "this technique will replace everything else" or "I expect my system to develop self-awareness over the next 18 months" and brings a bit of closure to them. If the project has failed then the project leaders need to be asked "what do you have to say about your extravagant claims?", "how do you feel about the grant money you frittered away?" and "how do you respond to the poeple who claimed you were a crackpot at the beginning?".
I'll have to put this story in my queue for re-examination in 2006.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Apparently, God reads slashdot... And has moderator points. ;)
But seriously, I think the social implications of AI creating religion without aid of human intervention might be quite ground shaking.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Like an earlier comment said, it took millions of years for languages to appear among humans, and that doesn't even account for whether or not the process is genuinely random, or whether there was some kind of direction involved.
I personally believe that the term "artificial intelligence" (at least as it currently applies) is misleading...Outside of science fiction, there really isn't any such thing. Even in situations where somebody's been able to come up with a genetic algorithm that produced something interesting, the AI it produced was only able to operate within its' given environment; i.e., as an expert system. Take it out of the target environment however, and it would fall flat on its face just as surely as a desktop machine after coming to the end of a shell script. There's no adaptability there whatsoever.
Computers still don't have any real capacity for dealing with novelty...the best any GA I've ever heard of has been able to do is widen the category of knowledge that a given expert system can have, and make the boundaries of said category *look* more fuzzy and organic...but in reality, it's smoke and mirrors.
Occasionally I'll see applications which stimulate my interest...the creatures in Black and White were innovative, and the Sims 2 makes reasonably good use of numerical weighting, even if the pathfinding there still sucks to a degree.
Assuming it's possible for strong AI to exist at all, (and again, I have grave doubts) everything I've seen tells me it's still anywhere between 50-200 years away. Skynet or it's equivalent won't be showing up anytime soon.
Yes. What we need now is to map the 'Proteome,' or rather, to create a dictionary of the many, many different proteins that the human body uses -- what they do, what they're made of, how they're folded, how they interact.
That's a much, much more difficult thing than simply 'mapping' the genome.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"