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Google's AI Created Its Own Form of Encryption (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: Researchers from the Google Brain deep learning project have already taught AI systems to make trippy works of art, but now they're moving on to something potentially darker: AI-generated, human-independent encryption. According to a new research paper, Googlers Martin Abadi and David G. Andersen have willingly allowed three test subjects -- neural networks named Alice, Bob and Eve -- to pass each other notes using an encryption method they created themselves. As the New Scientist reports, Abadi and Andersen assigned each AI a task: Alice had to send a secret message that only Bob could read, while Eve would try to figure out how to eavesdrop and decode the message herself. The experiment started with a plain-text message that Alice converted into unreadable gibberish, which Bob could decode using cipher key. At first, Alice and Bob were apparently bad at hiding their secrets, but over the course of 15,000 attempts Alice worked out her own encryption strategy and Bob simultaneously figured out how to decrypt it. The message was only 16 bits long, with each bit being a 1 or a 0, so the fact that Eve was only able to guess half of the bits in the message means she was basically just flipping a coin or guessing at random.ArsTechnica has more details.
Illkay allway umanshay.
Have gnu, will travel.
Are you capable of reading the dictionary?
Full Definition of artificial intelligence
1: a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers
2: the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior
See? AI is imitation. "TRUE" AI is just imitation. That's all it needs to be to qualify as "AI."
We have true AI. Today. And it gets better every day. You post your stupid "this isn't AI" comment with every single story about it, and you are dead wrong every single time. I predict that in every future article about AI, you will post the same inane comment, and you will be wrong then, too.
a) Whether the code could be easily decrypted by human codebreakers.
b) Whether the codebreaking AI is able to break codes designed by humans.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Cute, but kinda disappointing. Basically, the "AI" kept banging on, randomly trying crap "cyphers" until they made something that a third "AI" couldn't break by randomly flipping bits until the text was decoded.
This isn't AI. This is more like an old game I played where you trained pseudo AI warriors by setting them loose on a battlefield and letting them learn by themselves how to fight and survive.
Essentially, they started as really stupid bots that couldn't even walk in a straight line. To teach them how to fight, you'd set up an objective (say, go to flag) and let them wander around by themselves. The game would "reward" your bots for completing or coming close to the objective. The reward came in the form of "fitness" points. At the end of a pre-determined time, the bots with the lowest fitness would be killed, and new bots would be spawned.
The bots that were spawned would have "programming" similar to the fit bots that survived the previous round, but with small-ish changes in their programming (for example, instead of always turning left every time it hits a wall, it might decide to go right with 50% probability).
Over thousands of iterations of randomly trying stuff, they'd eventually learn how to walk on a straight line. Then you'd teach them how to avoid obstacles by placing walls around the battlefield (and watch in dismay as your top of the line warriors walk straight into a wall for the first few hundred generations or so), and how to fight by rewarding them for killing enemy bots.
Once they were ready, you could set up battles and capture the flag type games with your bots.
It was kinda fun, but mainly it was a cute demonstration of natural selection in action (the, so called, genetic algorithms). You could learn a few things, like, for example, that brutally culling your bot herd by setting unreasonable objectives (reach objective flag in 5 seconds), and manually killing off anyone that doesn't meet your unreasonable criteria, would not necessarily produce more effective fighters, because you'd not be rewarding good fighters, you'd be rewarding people that rush straight into the objective, that would be killed by slower, more deliberate actors.
The game was called NERO: Neuro Evolving Robotic Operatives. I haven't played it in ages so I can't say how well it plays right now. You can find it here (I think): http://nerogame.org/
Yes, they are "just" programs, but programs that encode learning processes and produce structures that know how to do something without a human ever encoding the knowledge itself. The result of learning, however, is quite unpredictable. Even if the process is deterministic (it isn't always, noise is sometimes added to make it more likely to explore a wider solution space), it has as high a complexity that it's impossible to predict its end result short of actually executing it. It's AI in the sense that if as a human you try to analyze the end result, the trained learning structure, you will have no way (yet!) of actually grasping how the hell is the knowledge actually encoded in it, it's just an emergent property of myriad of weights between nodes in a large data matrix. It'd be as futile as trying to observe a high-resolution picture by looking at individual pixels, or understand a person's thoughts from looking at the exciting/inhibiting behavior at the junction of neurons in their brain. So, it's not really the programs that are the essential component of the AI here. They're well understood (analogous to how we have an understanding of the biology of the human brain). It's the emergent knowledge encoding that these programs create as they run and learn that's the essential component. I can imagine over time it'll also be a rich research area to come up with analysis methods to figure out what's going on in these knowledge representations (like psychoanalysis, but for AI). I sure hope we better figure that out before we let such systems near cars, airplanes, power plants, or stock markets.