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Computer Learns Language By Playing Games
Frans Faase writes "By basing its strategies on the text of a manual, a computer infers the meanings of words without human supervision. The paper Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework (PDF) explains how a computer program succeeds in playing Civilization II using the official game manual as a strategy guide. This manual uses a large vocabulary of 3638 words, and is composed of 2083 sentences, each on average 16.9 words long. By this the program improves it success rate from 45% to 78% in playing the game. No prior knowledge of the language is used."
All Civilization-franchise manuals soon to be confiscated and destroyed in the name of national security.
It's always confirmation bias!
in schools? Get kids reading decent manuals (text-books) and perhaps they may actually learn something and find they can do decent things with the new-found knowledge.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
Right, so because the journalist of the article picked the wrong screenshot, and because they likely told their software that whitespace seperates words, it must be bullshit.
Standard slashdot loser, trying so desperately to degrade the efforts of others to make himself feel better about his dead-end IT job.
Computers have always been good for doing tedious jobs that people don't want to do.
Like reading manuals.
Mostly the kind of language you don't use among polite company.
Call me when computers learn to swear idiomatically and emotionally appropriately.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
And yet somehow I've managed to buy dozens of games that are non-FPS in the last few years. Must have been made by aliens I guess.
Right, so because the journalist of the article picked the wrong screenshot, and because they likely told their software that whitespace seperates words, it must be bullshit.
Standard slashdot loser, trying so desperately to degrade the efforts of others to make himself feel better about his dead-end IT job.
Taken from the article itself:
But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin
So if they're coding that "whitespace separates words", then any text written in Mandarin will consist of sentences with one single word? Mandarin and many other Asian languages (other Chinese dialects, Korean, Japanese, Thai) do not use whitespace to indicate word boundary.
I won't find language AI interesting until we have true language learning. Sure, this may be better than previous attempts at language AI, but when there are limiting assumptions built into the foundation of the code, I find it hard to believe that it will ever be able to "learn" any language.
Section 6 of the paper seems to imply that even the most illiterate fool would still win about 30% more games by having a copy of the manual, no matter how illiterate they are.
I just like to look at the pictures.
If this thing gets a copy of the Bible, we are boned.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Needless to say, the downloaded copies were better than store bought, because they didn't have copy protection / DRM, but obviously they didn't have the manual that came in the box from the store.
You'd think it might have been easier to have the computer use the same technique we used to do in that situation - try every key one by one until you figured out how the game worked.
Tuning pages with your right hand does not count as understanding them, any more than your hand counts as a spouse.
Just another ignorant American.
I believe that one of them is your battleships always loses to warriors or pike men.
Time to offend someone
They do use separations, but in their own way. Each character is a self-contained unit, separated from the others by being a different character. Each character is comprised of 5 or so different sections, each with its own function.
You're partially right.
In Mandarin, each character is a self-contained unit, and is separate from others around it. The problem, though, is that one character is not always a complete word. If you look character-by-character, you'll break down multi-character words like "shou ji" (cellphone) to "hand" and "machine".
Further, there isn't one single way of constructing a character in Chinese; there are 6 ways. The only consistency is that in some ways, there are radicals that can be used to glean the general meaning (eg, san dian shui "three-dot-water" or shou zi pang "hand-character radical").
I'm not as familiar with other Asian languages, but my understanding is that one Korean character is constructed from an alphabet and only indicates one syllable -- again, not always a complete word.
Shall we play a game?
How about Global Thermonuclear War?
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT