Slashdot Mirror
Machine-Learning AI Now Beats Humans At Super Smash Bros. Melee (qz.com)
"The AI is definitely godlike," one professional player told Quartz. "I am not sure if anyone could beat it." An anonymous reader quotes their report about an AI's showdown with the best players of Super Smash Bros. Melee:
Of 10 professionals that faced the bot, each one was killed more than they could kill the bot... But the bot was once only as good as a mere mortal. At first, Vlad Firoiu, creator and a competitive Smash player himself, couldn't train 'Phillip' to be as strong as the in-game bot, which he says even the worst players can beat fairly easily. Firoiu's solution? He started making the bot play itself over and over again, slowly learning which techniques fail and which succeed, called reinforcement learning. Then, he left it alone.
"I just sort of forgot about it for a week," said Firoiu, who coauthored an unreviewed paper with William F. Whitney, the NYU student [who helped him] on the work. "A week later I looked at it and I was just like, 'Oh my gosh.' I tried playing it and I couldn't beat it."
Business Insider points out that their AI read the players positions, velocities, and states directly from the game's memory, so the AI responds six times faster than a human player. To compensate it played as Captain Falcon, the game's slowest character, but there was one crucial glitch. "One particularly clever player found that the simple strategy of crouching at the edge of the stage caused the network to behave very oddly, refusing to attack and eventually KOing itself by falling off the other side of the stage."
"I just sort of forgot about it for a week," said Firoiu, who coauthored an unreviewed paper with William F. Whitney, the NYU student [who helped him] on the work. "A week later I looked at it and I was just like, 'Oh my gosh.' I tried playing it and I couldn't beat it."
Business Insider points out that their AI read the players positions, velocities, and states directly from the game's memory, so the AI responds six times faster than a human player. To compensate it played as Captain Falcon, the game's slowest character, but there was one crucial glitch. "One particularly clever player found that the simple strategy of crouching at the edge of the stage caused the network to behave very oddly, refusing to attack and eventually KOing itself by falling off the other side of the stage."
Sure, you got a better AI than you started with, but it's still cheating, even if it is using the slowest character in the game.
Now program it to emulate the time delays for using a controller and having to recognize what's happening on screen instead of the instant data i/o from direct machine & memory access.
If you can reliably beat humans at that level, then you've actually done something worth talking about.
And yet we can't seem to create AC posters who can pass the Turing Test.
Soon after, the emerging strong AI applications being developed by the primitive tech titans of the time began besting humanities brightest and most skilled players at various leisure activities. First, simple board-games, chess came early, then go, and soon the entirety of the skills based social board and card games of the 19th century. This was followed by the more modern trivia, grammar, and logic based social leisure activities. Video-games came next (the popular two 2 and 2.5D visual based games of the time) and finally, in march of 2021, (incidentally, nearly 35 years to the day, before the escalation of the Humanity First Treaty, which directly led to the great war 2057) the first paintball and laser-tag "bots" showed the world the killing potential of fully automated combat. Later that same year, Earths first fully robotics sports teams eclipsed humanities best athletes at nearly every skills based antithetic sport (with the exception of water-polo)
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.