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IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm (fastcompany.com)

Posted by msmash on from the ideal-pac-man dept.

harrymcc writes: The better AI gets at teaching itself to perform tasks in ways beyond the skills of mere humans, the more likely it is that it may unwittingly behave in ways a human would consider unethical. To explore ways to prevent this from happening, IBM researchers taught AI to play Pac-Man without ever gobbling up the ghosts. And it did so without ever explicitly telling the software that this was the goal. Over at Fast Company, I wrote about this project and what IBM learned from conducting it.

The researchers built a piece of software that could balance the AI's ratio of self-devised, aggressive game play to human-influenced ghost avoidance, and tried different settings to see how they affected its overall approach to the game. By doing so, they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them.

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Precisely. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is being made up to be something it's not. Just another example of how non-technical people might interpret technical work.

    And just another example of using trendy buzzwords to get undeserved attention.

  2. But can you teach Google by ruddk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think so. :*)

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    L'Idiot
  3. Re: I fail to see what this has to do with ethics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yea. Even sillier when you remember that Pac Man gets points for eating ghosts, exponent style. The ideal Pac Man eats four ghosts per power pellet, otherwise you are leaving points on the table. Because the game has a finite number lf levels, every abandoned ghost is a lower total score.

  4. Er... that's not teaching the AI *ethics*. by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's having an algorithm grind out a solution to playing the game which meets an additional constraints, which they tweak.

    If they'd actually taught the AI ethics, the AI would construct the play constraints for itself starting from ethical principles. At full human levels of ethical self awareness, the AI would be chasing ghosts down the hall and then -- unprompted -- stop and ask itself, "What am I doing?"

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  5. Re:Slight contradiction? by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Then the title should be "IBM researchers teach Pac-Man to be mostly harmless".

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