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AI Can Beat Humans Only One Game At a Time (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Despite all of the potential for artificial intelligence to solve our most vexing problems, it's still in a primitive state, according to a new report by Stanford University. But a separate paper, this one by Alphabet's DeepMind, suggests again that it has made some of its best progress in the narrow realm of games. Why it matters: Those advances are important, but life isn't a game. AI progress outside of these areas has been harder to define and track. "The most important thing for AI is to go from exceptional promise to use in actual everyday life," Martial Hebert, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, tells Axios.
Not nearly enough on sexbot technology.
let's play Global Thermonuclear War!
... desperately hoping for A.I. that will do it for them so they never have to. This won't end well.
Three AI stories in a row.
I poop in my own mouth. Din’t need no stinkin’ AI to do dat!!!
Just sayin'.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Life is too very much a game. We are all state machines.
"AI Can Beat Humans Only One Game At a Time" headline straight after a story about AI beating various other human-beating AI's in several different games.
Certain genres, at least, are more like "real life" than e.g. image classification and other tasks commonly approached using machine learning. A program that can play Starcraft, or GTA, or Grand Turismo, or Counterstrike using the same inputs and outputs as a human player is a lot closer to programs for real-world tasks like driving a car, than a program that identifies handwritten characters or plays Go.
.:Semper Absurda:.
Yes indeed it is. You can't take an AI, of any form, raise it from a blob of generic neural nets, teach it english, then teach it to manipulate it's own robot arm, show it the chess rules wikipedia page, and have it play a game. Even if such an AI existed it might very well be a shitty chess player.
Current chess AI are very much tailored to playing chess, where the inputs and outputs are simple.
Someone will probably accuse me of moving the goalposts, demanding an ever better standard for what constitutes "real" AI. I personally have always maintained that human-level or better intelligence would satisfy my definition.
So, 8 billion bare metal servers, running 10,000 virtual machines each, and the world is conquered.
For board games, at least... right?
Right?
>life isn't a game
It can certainly be treated as one; the goal is to have the longest uninterrupted chemical reaction (I'm at around 4 billion years, personally). You can narrow that down to a 'minigame' where the goal is for an organism to successfully replicate (I'm losing there, since I've only managed replacement at 2.0 children and generally you want some redundancy just to be sure). And that game can also be divided into a number of mini-minigames.
A game is a contest with rules, goals, and a scoring system. In chess it's to checkmate your opponent and avoid being checkmated using a variety of pieces that move in certain ways on a limited checkered surface. In life it's a bit more complicated, but that doesn't mean treating it like a game is a flawed strategy.
Do you want to play thermonuclear war?
But AI's got what plants cra...oh wait, wrong thread.
Probably the best summary of Google ever made.
vs. Stockfish?
Why do I think Stockfish was running on a 4 CPU box and AlphaZero running on something a few orders of magnitude greater?
except as a platonic ideal in scifi-land. In real life, it doesn't for some very fundamental reasons. But most journalists are writers, so they see 'AI' and think Asimov.
There is no AI
Intelligence is insight. The ability to apply one experience or idea to a different and unrelated concept. "the eureka" moment, the creative spark, curiosity... .
Today's computers do only task programming. A system is programmed to perform a specific task with predetermined parameters. I submit that using today's technology, AI is not even possible. Look at the hardware layer. A "massively parallel" system has what, a few dozen cores limited by bus of connectivity.
A brain, even an lower mammal has billions interconnected neurons, each capable of independent firing and the inter-connectivity is dynamic as it changes over time, experiences and developing needs and/or skills.
Till the medium of computer development changes, AI is over-hyped task programming.
A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it.
Stanislaw Lem, The Futurological Congress (1971).
USB, USB, USB!
The AI book that everyone should get is available for pre-order. "Artificial Intelligence For Dummies" by John Paul Mueller and Luca Massaron.
How did this get +5 on a site filled with CS people? A game does not need a goal and does not need a scoring system. The only thing an activity needs to be a game is a limited set of possible conditions and rules.
This is sophomore CS knowledge.
Moreover, it's common sense. "In life it's a bit more complicated, but that doesn't mean treating it like a game is a flawed strategy." The fact that life is "a bit more complicated" than chess does mean that attempting to approach life as one would beating chess is a flawed strategy.
Pathetic really. I'm beginning to understand why the number of trolls grow while the number of contributors shrink every month (along with slashdot's monetary and social value). Cheap entertainment is the only good that can come of discussions here anymore.
>life isn't a game
It can certainly be treated as one;
No way. If life can be treated as one, then where's my wall hacks and OP cheat codes? And don't tell me it's still loading or it bugged out with the stupid memory leaks.
/joke
This is the problem - the variables in life and in the world are quite literally infinite, and will only increase as the population does - so long as software is mathematically based, which is absolute, it will *always* be the problem. It's impressive calculation, sure, but it actually *isn't* learning in the truest sense, and it doesn't 'know' that it's playing games, it sure as hell isn't sentience. Dreams of Commander Data are just dreams. Enough with the hype, already.
Game theory is "strategic decision theory" and drives most nation-state actors and giant corporations.
If you can contrive the problem as a game, then the AI game-winner can be super-human at it.
Can you think of a nation-state actor or giant corporation that says "instead of being clearly and unilaterally superhuman in our strategic decisions we want to be merely human, or even engineered-by-committee-subhuman in our competitive abilities"? I can't.
You might be asking yourself the wrong questions.
-EngrStudent