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Artificial Neural Networks Demonstrate the Evolution of Human Intelligence

samazon writes "Ph.D. students at Trinity College in Dublin have constructed an artificial neural network model to demonstrate the Machiavellian intelligence theory — that human intelligence evolved based on the need for social teamwork and indexing a variety of social relationships and statuses. (Abstract) The experiment involved programming a base group of 50 simulated 'brains' which were required to participate one of two classical game theory dilemmas — the Prisoner's Dilemma or the Snowdrift game. Upon completion of either game, each 'brain' produced 'offspring' asexually, with 'brains' that made more advantageous choices during the games programmed to have a better chance to reproduce. A potential random mutation during each generation changed the 'brain's structure, number of neurons, or the strengths of the connections between those neurons,' simulating the evolution of the social brain. After 50,000 generations, the model showed that as cooperation increased, so did the intelligence of the programmed brains." The full paper is available.

76 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Now... by Like2Byte · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now *THAT's* intelligent design!

    $Ducks

    1. Re:Now... by X0563511 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I know you made a joke, but this right here is why believing in intelligent design and evolution etc are not necessarily incompatible with each other.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    2. Re:Now... by PatDev · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I know you made a joke, but this right here is why believing in intelligent design and evolution etc are not necessarily incompatible with each other.

      No, it is not. They are incompatible.

      Intelligent Design comes in two forms. The first is when we admit that it is just a euphemism for creationism. In this case, the theory of evolution (as well as most of the field of archaeology) clearly contradicts the story of Genesis, thus rendering the two incompatible.

      The second is the form in which ID, in an attempt to distance itself from religion, rests upon the principle of irreducible complexity. The basic idea is that certain constructs represented in nature today (the human eye is an oft-used example) would have been useless in a less-complex or less specific form, and thus these traits would not have evolved (a half-formed eye is an evolutionary disadvantage, a being is better off not wasting the calories keeping that useless tissue alive). Since these traits could not develop through incremental changes, some traits must not evolve, but must have been put there by some intelligent agent.

      This second form is not so much a scientific theory as it is a fundamental misunderstanding of stochastic processes and the field of mathematical optimization. This form of ID is basically the claim that evolutionary optimization can never escape local optima to discover global optima - something a competent applied mathematician knows to be false.

    3. Re:Now... by Baloroth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There is a third form you missed entirely, to which (I think) parent is referring. A situation where an intelligence creates the initial conditions necessary for life (in the case of the universe, the laws and parameters that govern it, or in a more local scale, the materials and conditions on the Earth that would bring about life in the end) which results in a "designed" life evolving on its own, as a consequence of those initial conditions, much like how this experiment outlines certain specific parameters that it hopes will bring about more advanced "brains".

      Well, I think that is a possibility under ID anyways, I'm certainly not an expert on it.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    4. Re:Now... by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      Yes, that is what I was alluding to exactly.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    5. Re:Now... by PatDev · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That is a distinct viewpoint known as Deism - also commonly discussed as a "watchmaker God". It is a means of reconciling belief in a deity with the apparent lack of evidence for one. However, Deism directly contradicts intelligent design - the two are as irreconcilable as evolution and intelligent design.

      Intelligent Design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design . The very undirected process a hypothetical Deist god would set in motion (evolution) is specifically what Intelligent Design claims does not work.

      It's not that evolution and religion cannot coexist - if I'm not mistaken, evolution even has the Papal seal of approval. They can. But intelligent design is not religion - it's a dogma pretending to be science. Only the form of pseudo-science they chose to make their defining point is so clearly refutable that they wind up with less credibility than if they had just gone with "faith" as their explanation.

    6. Re:Now... by geekoid · · Score: 1

      Yes they are incompatible.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    7. Re:Now... by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      Oh shut the fuck up. I'm saying there's a way for people to believe in both, not that I personally do. I think it's a whole bunch of horse-shit, personally... but I do respect the beliefs of others, which is why I try to find compromises such as this. News flash: the world is not black/white right/wrong correct/incorrect.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    8. Re:Now... by tnk1 · · Score: 2

      This IS a possibility under what I would call "Weak Intelligent Design".

      However, it is important to note that, in that context, Weak ID is not a direct competitor to evolution, it is a cause of it. Therefore, evolution becomes the only *scientific* mechanism for actual development of species (although a hypothetical deity could still decide to intervene directly). A Weak ID person may well then oppose this law because there is no scientific evidence for any other theory that describes how species emerge. To their mind, any "Strong ID" belongs more properly in a philosophy classroom, not in a science classroom, because it describes something that is possible, but impossible to use science to prove.

      It does bear mentioning that it is possible that a deity could have created the Earth and Universe in 6006BC, and then simply created those entities in such as way as to make them look like they were 15 billion years old. There is nothing that prevents a creator from creating current conditions "in place" and then laughing as we scamper around trying to figure out what happened. And that is why I usually don't get spun up about this stuff. Thinking that way is entirely useless as a way of making scientific discoveries, but there is nothing that says science has to have the answers to *everything*.

    9. Re:Now... by TheDarkMaster · · Score: 1

      Exists a third alternative, in my honest opinion: An intelligence from space in action.

      I still remember the interesting theory that the "gods" were actually astronauts from other worlds. The evolution is still valid, but as Arthur C. Clarke would say, we may have "taken an evolutionary kick in the butt".


      P.S: Google translation sucks. Do not worry about my terrible grammar

      --
      Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
    10. Re:Now... by IcyHando'Death · · Score: 1

      IANAL, but I do play Devil's Advocate on Slashdot from time to time. So forgive me, mods, if I criticise this criticism of ID. It should not be taken as a defense of the indefensible. But I just can let such sloppy logic go unchallenged.

      Intelligent Design comes in two forms. The first is when we admit that it is just a euphemism for creationism. In this case, the theory of evolution (as well as most of the field of archaeology) clearly contradicts the story of Genesis, thus rendering the two incompatible.

      There are many versions of creationism besides the Christian ones. You'll have to do better than that to prove incompatibility

      This form of ID is basically the claim that evolutionary optimization can never escape local optima to discover global optima - something a competent applied mathematician knows to be false.

      Wrong, wrong, wrong. The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless. That is abolutely the case. The problem with ID is that this uselessness is not a given. It's not that a random process can result in an escape from a local optimum (which is true to a limited extent, but not really relevant here). It's that a partial eye is not useless. Nor a partial flagellum.

    11. Re:Now... by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      You are all missing the point.

      There's no reason a deity could not create the tools/laws/conditions that cause life/evolution/etc to occur. Thus ID and scientific theories such as Evolution do not inherently conflict.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    12. Re:Now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The very undirected process a hypothetical Deist god would set in motion (evolution) is specifically what Intelligent Design claims does not work.

      People who believe in both Intelligent Design and evolution, and also have some knowledge of the science behind evolution and natural selection, don't necessarily say that evolution on its own cannot produce the creatures that we see, but rather say that it is so statistically unlikely that it would have required the manipulation of probability by some intelligent deity to arrive at the results we have.

    13. Re:Now... by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      An example is Monsanto. They are semi-gods and semi-creators. And they have a lot of wrath.

    14. Re:Now... by coliverhb · · Score: 1

      It's times like this when I think about what I would say if a religious fundamentalist came up to me and asked me (and, yes, I know I have a tendency to over-dramatize my thoughts) "What has your precious science given you?" to which I would reply "Doubt."

      Now here's where I get to how this involves your post; you seem awfully sure that there is no God - even to the point where you're claiming to know the intricacies of the universe to the extent that you can apparently claim to know every point in time from the universes beginning to its end and the whole of existence within it.

      Seems evidence to me that God exists, and his Slashdot SN is geekoid.

    15. Re:Now... by bigAhi · · Score: 1

      that it hopes will bring about more advanced "brains"

      Wouldn't it be likely that the the "intelligence", the Ph.D. students in this case, would tweak the parameters, or nudge the evolution in a particular direction. Or introduce a mechanism or object that might change the course of the evolution? I know I would if I were in their shoes, probably repeatedly if I had a desired outcome.

      Any intelligence with the motivation and capability to kickstart a project like this is probably going to have the motivation and capability to interfere at some point. This starts looking more like the second form.

    16. Re:Now... by Baloroth · · Score: 1

      That depends on the power you attribute to the creator. If you say that god is omnipotent and omniscient, it becomes unnecessary for him to nudge evolution along a different path, because he can order things so that they don't need a nudge. Humans have to tweak the parameters because we aren't omniscient, so we don't know what the results will be with a given set of parameters, but a creator would.

      Obviously it is still possible for him to interfere if he so chooses, but he wouldn't need to for the natural order to arrive at the desired end. You can, of course, argue that it is fitting for him to interfere at key points, or that he would still need to in order to teach mankind about himself, but that would fall under the purview of religion and philosophy.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
    17. Re:Now... by Fned · · Score: 1

      Intelligent Design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design . The very undirected process a hypothetical Deist god would set in motion (evolution) is specifically what Intelligent Design claims does not work.

      That's kind of like saying if you change things on a network later to make it work the way you want, that you didn't design it in the first place.

      If Deism doesn't include the possibility of a fallible God that never changes his mind about things, that doesn't mean that ID doesn't. Yes, that may very well make ID incompatible with any number of religions, a controversy which I wholeheartedly endorse be taught in Tennessee schools.

    18. Re:Now... by suutar · · Score: 1

      But would that override a motivation to see what happens without interference?

    19. Re:Now... by Forty+Two+Tenfold · · Score: 1

      Oh shut the fuck up. I'm saying there's a way for people to believe in both

      No, you shut the fuck up!

      He wrote:

      GOD IS POWER

      He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of selfdeception. How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed. It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. He hardly knew why he had ever rebelled. Everything was easy, except!

      Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

      1984

      Also, I really doubt this:

      I do respect the beliefs of others

      because I don't think you respect the belief of a [supposed] Muslim fanatic that blowing himself up together with a bunch of innocent people is a GoodThing(TM).

      --
      Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
    20. Re:Now... by holmstar · · Score: 2

      The universe is absurdly huge. Even something with a tiny statistical likelihood is almost guaranteed to happen at some point, somewhere, and probably in many variations.

    21. Re:Now... by ppanon · · Score: 1

      Your last paragraph describes what I consider to be religious existentialism, with even less use and insight than secular/traditional existentialism. I rarely find practical jokes or fraud to be even remotely funny, except sometimes when practiced on people with a heavily overdrawn karma account, and any deity that engages in them indiscriminately isn't worthy of much respect in my opinion.

      --
      Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
    22. Re:Now... by tnk1 · · Score: 1

      You only say that because you don't think you're going to come face to face with an actual deity.

      For my part, I make it a point of respecting anything that can smite me so hard I taste the color blue, two weeks ago. Particularly since two weeks ago was very out of season for blues. I prefer a good taupe in the morning to go with my heaping portion of Dada.

    23. Re:Now... by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 1

      I know you made a joke, but this right here is why believing in intelligent design and evolution etc are not necessarily incompatible with each other.

      They're not necessarily incompatible, but here's the thing: We know evolution is happening right now and has been happening since the first living thing existed because random mutation and natural selection of advantageous variants is an unavoidable consequence of living things reproducing or in fact anything reproducing.

      We have no evidence that intelligent design is happening or ever happened.

      The theory that explains everything by random mutation and natural selection is elegant and sufficient. Occam's Razor says we shouldn't elaborate it with extraneous entities like gods or super-intelligent beings interfering in the process.

    24. Re:Now... by Gregg+Alan · · Score: 1

      but rather say that it is so statistically unlikely that it would have required the manipulation of probability by some intelligent deity to arrive at the results we have.

      I either don't remember or haven't heard this version. They think it's more probable that a deity manipulated probability? While that doesn't sound scientific to me, I'm intrigued. Do you have a link I could start with (yes, I'll google it for myself, but you seem to already know of the idea.)

      --
      Here before all but 8486 of you.
    25. Re:Now... by ppanon · · Score: 1

      In the same way that you can hate the sin and love the sinner, I can respect the smiting and the blue while still thinking the smiter's an ass. To provide a Godwining example, Messerschmitt Me 262 or Panzerkampfwagen V Panther and Adolph Hitler.

      --
      Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
    26. Re:Now... by jc42 · · Score: 2

      The ID propenents are on very solid ground in their belief that something as complex as an eye, a flagellum or the blood clotting cascade could not evolve given that the partially formed proto-systems are useless.

      Actually, their argument really reduces to "I don't see how the intermediate stages could be adaptive, so they weren't." But an interesting example appeared in the biological literature about a decade ago: A group of starfish called "brittle stars" (because of their hard surface made of silicate crystals) are in the very early stages of evolving a compound eye, and it's quite adaptive.

      The critical part of this discovery is that their hard crystalline surface contains scattered lenses that focus incoming light on light-sensitive cells in the underlying skin surface. It is estimated that the resulting proto-eyes has an angular resolution of only about 1 degree, which isn't very good. It's about twice the angular diameter of the sun and moon, so these important light sources would be only around 1 pixel to them. But this does give them the ability to locate light sources and shadows, and to spot moving objects that are in good contrast to their background.

      These critters' eyes are nowhere near as accurate as ours, or (to make a more relevant comparison) the eyes of crustacea or insects. But they are apparently beneficial to the stars, and are at a very early stage of development. In fact, there have been a number of comments on the high optical quality of their little lenses, comparable to the best lenses that humans can manufacture.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    27. Re:Now... by Migala77 · · Score: 1

      The very undirected process a hypothetical Deist god would set in motion (evolution) is specifically what Intelligent Design claims does not work.

      People who believe in both Intelligent Design and evolution, and also have some knowledge of the science behind evolution and natural selection, don't necessarily say that evolution on its own cannot produce the creatures that we see, but rather say that it is so statistically unlikely that it would have required the manipulation of probability by some intelligent deity to arrive at the results we have.

      But all the millions/billions/whatever times the evolution did not produce intelligent creatures we were not there to observe it. You don't know how many failed evolutions you haven't observed, so unlikeliness does not imply manipulation.

    28. Re:Now... by radtea · · Score: 1

      Thinking that way is entirely useless as a way of making scientific discoveries, but there is nothing that says science has to have the answers to *everything*.

      But there is something (the Jaynes/Cox derivation of Bayes' rule, which depends only on a consistency condition) that says that if science doesn't have the answer, neither does anything else.

      --
      Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
    29. Re:Now... by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      You quote fiction to back you up? Yea, OK.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    30. Re:Now... by X0563511 · · Score: 1

      OK? I never said we knew. All I am doing is offering up the simple fact that they are not incompatible as-is. Everyone else, yourself included, is reading more into what I say than there is.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    31. Re:Now... by __aaltlg1547 · · Score: 1

      OK? I never said we knew. All I am doing is offering up the simple fact that they are not incompatible as-is. Everyone else, yourself included, is reading more into what I say than there is.

      If everyone misunderstood you, the fault lies with you. You must not have said whatever it was you intended to express.

  2. Human intelligence ? by mbone · · Score: 1

    They had a whopping 20 neurons (nodes).

    Wouldn't this be more like a model of insect intelligence, say from about 250 million years ago ? Maybe it could explain the evolution of bees.

    1. Re:Human intelligence ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Please reference previous comment. This clearly is designed to model intelligence in Tennessee. Now if we could just fast forward 50,000 generations...

    2. Re:Human intelligence ? by SuricouRaven · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Keep going. C.Elegans has more neurons than that.

      You can go look at them - someone has been nice enough to digitise the entire nervous system, down to every last synapse. It's browseable at http://wormweb.org/neuralnet#c=BAG&m=1

      For the singulatity fans: Yes, this is almost the first full brain upload. It isn't quite, as it doesn't store synapse response data and the brain-map is actually a composite from multible individuals, but give it a couple more decades and one of the little worms may go down in history as the first naturally-occuring intelligence (If you can call it that) to make the transition to digital immortality.

    3. Re:Human intelligence ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      You mean 200 generations, from 6000BC.

    4. Re:Human intelligence ? by zlives · · Score: 2

      please account for inbreeding...

  3. Interesting consequences by Covalent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The paper suggests that evolution favors cooperation but that it also favors low-cost solutions (i.e. lots of little dumb brains (ants) vs. singular powerful brains (humans)). Perhaps this explains the Fermi Paradox: Aliens are all over the place on other worlds, but they're mostly the former kind of cooperative rather than the latter.

    --
    Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
    1. Re:Interesting consequences by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The paper suggests that evolution favors cooperation

      The experiment in question picked "games" that require cooperation to achieve best results. So naturally the paper would suggest that evolution favors cooperation.

      Linking reproduction to cooperation might be a reasonable theory. Or not. But this experiment doesn't suggest anything other than "if we make cooperation an asset in our experiment, then cooperation will work better in our experiment".

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    2. Re:Interesting consequences by argStyopa · · Score: 1

      It's an interesting result, my only doubt is that these sorts of models are so critically sensitive on (for lack of a better term) 'moral' assumptions built into the rules - that valuations of the results.

      For the Snowdrift game, for example, if you do nothing while the other driver shovels, you 'win' with 300. If you shovel and the other driver doesn't, you still get 100. If you both shovel, you both get 200. So in a sense they 'bias' the game by rewarding you for accepting being exploited, you're just rewarded less than if you did the exploiting. If the point values were 300 for sitting and letting them shovel, 100 for both shoveling, and -100 if you were exploited, I suspect that the results would be significantly different.

      Of course, I understand that we simplify models to simplify complex subjects but to me the number of assumptions inherent in these simplifications often overshadows the value we can draw from the models.

      --
      -Styopa
    3. Re:Interesting consequences by medv4380 · · Score: 1

      Not really. Think of it as a Mendel Square. Lets say the one who exploited got 4 children The ones who both shoveled got 2 children each The one who was exploited got 1 children The ones who both did not shovel got 0 children The advantage come in when both try to exploit the exploitation gene will be at a severe disadvantage. After all you cant have children if you don't dig yourself out of the hole or someone digs you out. Exploiting can be a big pay out but it can also be a death sentence.

    4. Re:Interesting consequences by jc42 · · Score: 1

      The paper suggests that evolution favors cooperation but that it also favors low-cost solutions (i.e. lots of little dumb brains (ants) vs. singular powerful brains (humans)). ...

      Are you saying that large complex brains (humans) can not and do not cooperate?

      Well, they can, but not nearly as well as ants. ;-)

      It has been pointed out that our planet has a much larger biomass of ants than of humans. By just about any measure of "success", ants are much more successful than we are. They are certainly more social.

      Of course, we're all part of a biosphere that requires a wide variety of species. So picking one feature (biomass, IQ, habitat volume, flight speed, etc.) as the prime measure of success is somewhat beside the point. Neither we nor the ants has the ability to exterminate the other, so by the popular "social Darwinism" metric, we're incommensurable, and neither is more successful than the other.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    5. Re:Interesting consequences by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      evolution...also favors low-cost solutions (i.e. lots of little dumb brains (ants) vs. singular powerful brains...

      On Earth we call them "Republicans without birth-control" ;-)

    6. Re:Interesting consequences by suutar · · Score: 1

      which would seem to model reality better than the alternative. Or are you asserting that the results of cooperation are inferior to the results of noncooperation at the small scale (individual to tribal size)?

    7. Re:Interesting consequences by suutar · · Score: 1

      Perhaps, but that wouldn't model the situation well. Even if you're the only shoveller, you still get your car out of the snowdrift. For that to be a net negative, you'd have to hurt yourself somehow in the process...

    8. Re:Interesting consequences by holmstar · · Score: 1

      What if there is a way to travel interstellar distances, a la hyperspace, but in discovering it, it also becomes possible to travel to a different universe/plane of existence that is immediately recognized as superior to our own. And, for intrinsic reasons, would be recognized as superior to any intelligence that discovered it? Intelligent species would then uproot and move to the better universe/plane once it became possible to do so.

      I'm not saying that I belive this, or that it's likely, but it's an interesting counterpoint to the doom and gloom scenarios proposed as solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

  4. Begging the Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So if we stipulate in our environment that smarter brains are more likely to reproduce, then the smarter brains reproduce just like would happen if human brains evolved to be smarter as a competitive advantage, so human brains evolved as a competitive advantage? They've stacked the dice to make evolution happen in their artificial world, so why should we make the inference that the world's dice are stacked in just the same way?

    1. Re:Begging the Question by Score+Whore · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, their paper is a tautology. Shorter paper: "We created a simulation of our rules. Then the simulation proved our rules."

    2. Re:Begging the Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” -- Nikola Tesla.

    3. Re:Begging the Question by Hentes · · Score: 1

      They did incorporate a fitness penalty for the number of neurons, but that penalty was arbitrary, just like the whole model.

    4. Re:Begging the Question by flabbergast · · Score: 1

      Hmmm, condenses my thoughts on the subject into two succinct sentences. Well done.

    5. Re:Begging the Question by Fned · · Score: 1

      Yes, their paper is a tautology. Shorter paper: "We created a simulation of our rules. Then the simulation proved our rules."

      Incorrect. They stipulated that brains that most successfully played the games were more likely to survive. They placed no artifical constraints on "smarter" (whatever that means). If neural networks becoming simpler over 50,000 generations of (getting better at co-operating)+(random mutations) were probable, it probably would have happened in the simulation. In fact, it might have, if any of the games had included the possibilty of self-sacrifice in addition to co-operate or not-co-operate.

    6. Re:Begging the Question by dinfinity · · Score: 1

      whatever that means

      Indeed. From the full text (jay, free to read! But frames, really?):

      It is with this tradition in mind that we develop our articial neural network model, with evolving network structure, using the number of neurons, i, as our proxy for intelligence.

      Not very sophisticated, if you ask me. More importantly, though:

      Context nodes, which store the previous state of their cognitive node and return this state (times a weight) as input in the next round, are labelled C.

      So they've implemented a special type of node that serves as a very very short term memory.

      For example, manual interrogation of networks revealed that, of the tit-for-tat type strategies that emerge, many are tit-for-2(or more)-tats

      (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat#Tit_for_two_tats). It is slightly interesting that the (round n-1) context nodes and traditional nodes combined can generate operational memory of round n-2, but what the paper boils down to is: evolving neural networks with memory nodes evolve strategies that use memory.
      My neurobiology isn't that strong, but I'm not too sure whether early life forms have the equivalent of such memory nodes, which kind of puts a dent in the whole this-could-be-in-part-how-early-intelligence-evolved.

  5. Can't be true ... by richieb · · Score: 3, Funny

    I've seen "Idiocracy". This can't be true.

    --
    ...richie - It is a good day to code.
  6. Iterated prisoner's dilemma? by Hentes · · Score: 1

    So did they evolve the optimal strategy of starting with cooperation then mirroring your opponent's last move? Because it's cooperative but you don't need many neurons for that.

    1. Re:Iterated prisoner's dilemma? by Confusedent · · Score: 1

      That isn't the optimal strategy, better ones have been found. I can't remember the title, but I remember reading a book on genetic algorithms which mentioned a competition in which professors were invited to submit Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma algorithms. Many were submitted, included the "tit for tat" strategy you refer to. IIRC the genetic algorithm killed them all and eventually found a unique strategy better than all the submitted algorithm's strategies, including the mirror/tit-for-tat one. On that note, I haven't read the paper yet but this hardly seems that exciting. They basically built a genetic algorithm to experiment with possible neural networks until it evolved a population optimized for well-known and well-studied games. Unless there's more to it than that, this seems like something already accomplished years ago. Cool, but hardly cutting-edge.

  7. Socialism ve Capitalism? by dryriver · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    If this reasearch is correct, people living under Socialism (where cooperation is high because it is mandatory and forms the very basis of the system) would wind up becoming smarter than people who live under Capitalism (where competition/versus behaviour and everyone-for-himself thinking is closer to being the norm, relatively speaking). This is an interesting result from a politics perspective, because proponents of unfettered, hard-core capitalism often charicature socialist systems/ideologies and the people who live under them as being "unfree" or "living like cattle". Quite a contradiction of views/results, eh? One could infer from this, that hard-core capitalists lack the "cooperative intelligence" that a working socialist system creates to such an extent, that hard-core capitalists cannot even comprehend how a cooperation-socialism based system works - because they never developed a comparable cooperation-based intelligence themselves. Of course it is somewhat silly to arrive at this result purely based on a clever neural-networks exercise that has been conducted by some PhD students. But the hypothesis of capitalists never developing, and thus largely lacking, the cooperative-intelligence needed to live in a socialist society is interesting nevertheless, is it not? It might explain why hard-core capitalists are so keen at swining rhetorical wrecking balls at anything that has even a small whiff of "socialist cooperative model" to it... Like Open Source Software - which is very much a product of cooperative intelligence - for example. To put it more simply, maybe prominent capitalists like Bill Gates cannot help dissing open source efforts like Linux, because they are, from a personal development standpoint, largely unfamiliar with the kind of cooperative-intelligence that a more "socialist" mode of product creation promotes.

    --
    Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
    1. Re:Socialism ve Capitalism? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So, you're basing your pet theory that Socialists are smarter than Capitalists based on a single experiment that used neural networks with the approximately 1/15th the complexity of a roundworm?

    2. Re:Socialism ve Capitalism? by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      You are making the mistake of assuming that extant socialist systems are any thing like their idealized portrayal.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    3. Re:Socialism ve Capitalism? by dryriver · · Score: 2

      The free market is a "vehicle for freedom and self-determination" only for people who get the "top jobs" in an economy and "call the shots" from the top of the pyramid. That would be 1 - 5 percent of the population, depending on the country you live in. For almost everyone else, unfettered ("unregulated") free-market capitalism is a system of abuse and serfdom that lasts a lifetime. Do you like Software/Content DRM? It was dreamed up by supposed "free-market capitalism". As was almost everything in the modern world that kills/maims/abuses/denigrates/disadvantages the common man. The hard-left and hard-right will never enter a synthesis, because the hard-right is so morally corrupt, exploitative, predatory and irresponsible that nothing good can come from cooperating with the hard-right. Period.

      --
      Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
  8. funny by muppet007 · · Score: 1

    Now that's intelligent ;) Does this formulier work?

  9. Re:But not in ... by sconeu · · Score: 1

    Beat me to it... DAMN!

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
  10. Cave Johnson here... by nman64 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Fact: The key to any successful cooperative test is trust, and as our data clearly shows, humans cannot be trusted. The solution: robots! Then, fire the guys who made those robots, and build better robots. Then, run those robots through a regimen of trust exercises, creating a foundation of mutual respect, reinforced by the simulated bonds of artificial friendship. Inspiring stuff. And finally, we put that trust to the test. Bam! Robots gave us six extra seconds of cooperation. Good job, robots. Cave Johnson. We're done here.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZMSAzZ76EU

  11. unnecessary by blackfrancis75 · · Score: 1

    Upon completion of either game, each 'brain' produced 'offspring' asexually

    You don't say...

  12. A bit of a deceptive title by medv4380 · · Score: 1

    The title made it sound like this was something big. In reality it's interesting but not that interesting. I've see this kind of thing before when they did something similar to get a "team" of robots to play a game together. Nice, but not human level intelligence. Heck it's not even cat or dog level intelligence. I was hoping this would be some kind of break though AI but really it's more disappointing reading the article.

    1. Re:A bit of a deceptive title by geekoid · · Score: 2

      Every time a break through in AI is made, it gets taken out of AI.

      I suspect that if I created an AI with a cat level intelligence, people would say the cat isn't intelligent.

      Internet search was one considered an AI problem, the moment it was solved it was taken away from AI.
      Many games have AI, but the moment they where created they where some how technical and not AI.

      10 years ago what Siri does would have been considered AI.
      Too many people put a mystical belief on top of intelligence. When you remove the mystical element people don't consider it intelligence.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:A bit of a deceptive title by medv4380 · · Score: 1

      What I'm saying is I've seen demonstrations of little robots that were built to play Soccer. They then set them into a breading program using a genetic algorithm and artificial neural networks and they evolved a method for communicating and recognizing team mates. What this article is about is a much lower form of intelligence than what has already been done. It's interesting only in how the application of game theory in artificial evolution. In terms of AI it's lack luster.

  13. The Problem with this Study by CanHasDIY · · Score: 2

    ... is the same problem pretty much every study has -- it's based on the concept of ceteris paribus, which does not exist in reality.

    From a purely academic standpoint, however, it is a neat experiment.

    --
    An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    1. Re:The Problem with this Study by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 1

      Really? Then explain this, twatwaffle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus

      --
      Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    2. Re:The Problem with this Study by Fned · · Score: 1

      ... is the same problem pretty much every study has -- it's based on the concept of ceteris paribus, which does not exist in reality.

      ...unless you're trying to create artificial intelligences. Knowing the minimum number of generations it might take for a particular method to produce emergent increases in general intelligence would seem to be handy information in that case.

    3. Re:The Problem with this Study by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      Really? Then explain this, twatwaffle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceteris_paribus

      ?:/

      That, numbnuts, is called Wikipedia, which is oft billed as the "Encyclopedia anyone can edit," hence the questionable nature of its content.

      Did you have a point? Perhaps, since you're obviously in opposition to my opinion, you can give some examples of real life situations in which all but a single variable are held equal?

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
    4. Re:The Problem with this Study by CanHasDIY · · Score: 1

      ... is the same problem pretty much every study has -- it's based on the concept of ceteris paribus, which does not exist in reality.

      ...unless you're trying to create artificial intelligences. Knowing the minimum number of generations it might take for a particular method to produce emergent increases in general intelligence would seem to be handy information in that case.

      How so? To me, all this proves is that, under controlled laboratory circumstances, "AI" will develop in the way you designed the experiment for them to develop.

      --
      An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
  14. Re:Proof that war is STUPID! by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 1

    Because we happily vote them in, but never fire them.

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  15. Re:Not sure what to call this by kurzweilfreak · · Score: 2
    Yes it is, if you understand what the hell you're talking about.

    So *someone* creates the neurons

    Where the neurons "come from" is irrelevant, whether they sprang forth from the magic of the intelligent designer or were created through abiogenesis. What is relevant is that they reproduce with a mechanism for heredity.

    creates connections

    Connections could be generated randomly and you will end up with the same result as long as you have heredity, mutation, and selection.

    establishes rules of selection

    Where the rules of selection come from is irrelevant, whether it's "natural" selection (environment) or "artificial" selection (we choose the rules, like for dog breeding). What matters is that there is selection choosing from a randomly generated pool of variety.

    creates mutations for random change

    What part of "random mutation" do you not get? Random mutations happen in DNA. This produces random variety that is then culled through selection. Same thing here.

    and that is somehow a model for completely random unguided uncreated evolution???

    Yes, because you have exactly the same mechanisms: heredity, random mutation, selection. Evolution isn't random; mutations are random.

    It's amazing how ridiculous something seems when you think you understand it but you really don't, doesn't it?

    --

    kurzweil_freak

    5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student

    Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.

  16. Re:Old MacDonald had a server farm. AI AI Ohhh!!!! by Velaki · · Score: 1

    LOL!

  17. All they've shown by GrandTeddyBearOfDoom · · Score: 1

    Is a loose demonstration of plausibility of the Mach. theory.

    --
    -- The Grand Teddy Bear has Spoken: "Windows 8 Source Code Available NOW! more disgusting than your pr..."