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IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm (fastcompany.com)
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.
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.
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.
Or is this supposed to impress us in some way?
I don't think so. :*)
L'Idiot
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.
I read the article, a lot of words for so little information.
It's also pretty easy to avoid the ghosts when then are trying to avoid the player.
BlameBillCosby.com
That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets in a sustainable way to pay for ghost shelters and outreach to better understand them and protect them.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it is. You might be able to create an AI that has some desirable characteristics based on human morality, but as soon as you make it compete against other AIs that don't possess those characteristics, it will either adapt to possess them itself in order to remain competitive or it will perish if it's been crippled in a way to prevent it from adjusting. A pacifistic Pac-Man AI might be novel, but if it was made to compete, it wouldn't do as well.
When the AI begins watching humans play Pac-Man, doing harm to the ghosts, it will consider humans a threat to ghosts and thus eliminate the humans to satisfy its directives. Is IBM's median employee age too young to have seen Robocop?
GHOSTBUSTERS!
..all day long for weeks and weeks.
That's what the title should be.
"Pacifist" runs of games are popular with the speedrunning community. Depending on the game it might be an achievement to simply finish it without harming anything, or it may just be another category to get the fastest time in.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
For a learning system, there is usually a factor to measure success. If the game ignore the points, and just the number of dots it ate, and how fast they did this, as its own internal scoring mechanism, and to only having to eat a ghost as a lower penalty then dying. So it will learn a separate scoring mechanism for it to be optimized which isn't related to the actual one.
For me I use to play "pacifist" doom. Where I wouldn't kill any of the monsters, but just run away from them and see how fast I can get to the next level. Only killing the final boss, because that is needed for the game.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man ...
-
No, the Liberal Pac Man is a poseur who expects someone else to take care of the world's problems because he is too busy trying to be cool to actually get his hands dirty.
Title: "IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man To Do No Harm"
Blurb: "they found a tipping point -- the setting at which Pac-Man went from seriously chowing down on ghosts to largely avoiding them."
So companies will presumably use a similar method to design AIs that will maximize corporate profit with only a _small_ amount of acceptable human murdering in the process?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Did they also have Pac-Man stop to ask why the ghosts hated him?
Wouldn't avoiding eating ghosts mean it just never got smart enough to know that you could eat power pills and then pass through them? That new optimal paths would arise when the power pill was active? If their algorithm added score for lower time or for points, I think this behavior would change.
"IBM Researchers Teach Pac-Man to Avoid Ghosts Even When It Is Advantageous To Eat Them" might not have the same ring to it.
Pac-Man might no longer be homicidal, but he still has a severe eating disorder.
^ He's right, you know.
The implications are that if we don't teach robots to kills us all, they won't kill us all? So all we humans have to do is stop killing each other, and we won't have to worry about Skynet and the Terminators.
That's the point. There are plenty of real world cases where we could be more efficient if we simply disregarded moral and ethical concerns. One of the concerns with machine learning is that they may find an optimal solution that violates ethical considerations. The problem is even larger when you consider an AI finding locally optimal solutions disregarding externalities.
For a classic example, Ford once determined that paying off expected damages in wrongful death suits would be slightly cheaper than refitting existing Pintos to not explode.
The Pac-Man simulation is a very simplified version of a case where, due to ethical considerations it is necessary to avoid the locally optimal solution.
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?"
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The definition of AI is getting seriously skewed by the media. This has nothing to do with AI. I could've programmed this and I have no AI programming training whatsoever.
I don't think so. They taught it by eliminating runs from the "success" pool when it ate a ghost.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
It would be interesting to know the difference in scores and completion times between the two game strategies. What is the advantage of being 'ethical'?
love is just extroverted narcissism
> The Pac-Man simulation is a very simplified version of a case where, due to ethical considerations it is necessary to avoid the locally optimal solution.
The Pac Man doesn't avoid any optimal solution. It simply defines optimum as not to include not touching ghosts - ghosts are bad. In the classic version of the game, touching a ghost is bad. Unless you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds. They trained the AIto NOT learn the "unless you've eaten a pellet". It just does "touching ghosts is bad".
There's nothing moral, or even interesting, about "in Pac-Man, touching ghosts is bad". Essentially, just one too stupid to know that Power Pellets do anything.
tic tac toe number of players zero
can it play global thermonuclear war?
It's right there in the article, “There’s lots of rules that you might not think of until you see it happen the way you don’t want it,”
Well, if you told a computer to do EXACTLY the thing, and it's possible, they'll do EXACTLY the thing. If you said one thing, but meant another, they're not going to do what you mean, they'll do what you told them. So if your success metric is high score, and eating ghosts increases that, they'll eat ghosts.
In fact, this is how it works with people too. If you make a bonus based on lines of code (LoC) or bugs fixed, you'll find out that your programmers will end up creating long patches that have errors that require dozens of bugfixes, because that's what pays the bills. If your warehouse managers are rated on how many packages they ship, you'll find that they're shipping a lot - maybe not to the right places, but that's not what you're measuring them on.
This is only surprising to people who - as the quote above shows - have declined to think about what they're asking.
Inb4 AmiMoJo:
You just hate ghosts because they look like they're wearing burkas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I see the start of a new movement of the BGM with t-shirts, rallies, riots and all....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What about Ms. Pac-Man?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Even non-speedrunning gamers can find some real joy in pacifist runs. It's often far more challenging to not kill enemies than it is to just play the game as designed. It requires different strategies and skills, and often radically different gameplay.
I've replayed a fair number of games that way, just because it breathes new life into an old favorite.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That's the Conservative Pac Man you're describing. The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets in a sustainable way to pay for ghost shelters and outreach to better understand them and protect them.
And PAC Pac Man doesn't disclose how many points he has and uses them to get the ghosts to do his bidding.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Meanwhile SuperPac Man just gobbles up all the points and uses them to lobby the game developer.
'Pac Man'? Excuse me, it's 2018. Who do you think you are to assume his gender orientation -- how very problematic of you.
Non-binary-genderqueer-trans-pac-demi-snowflake; thank you very much.
The Liberal Pac Man takes care not to eat the ghosts, and uses whatever points he get from eating pellets
Not very many, b/c the Liberal Pac Man deliberately allows the ghosts to defeat pac man.
Once by Pinky, then Inky, and Clyde, in that order --- Blinky doesn't get a turn, b/c there are only 3 Pacman Lives, and Blinky has too much privilege.
There is no Liberal Pac Man, only Liberal Pac Gender Neutral Personhood Entity
Well... there's the other game Misses Pacwoman, I think it's called. They could also introduce a new version:
Mr(s) Pac gender-fluid character
Nobody is talking about the environmental devastation caused by over-harvesting of pac-dots.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It requires different strategies and skills, and often radically different gameplay.
Or for most games it might just be plain not possible.... example Zelda: A link to the Past.
Plenty of unavoidable rooms that explicitly trap the player until all opponents in a room are slain, and key items
necessary to progress that require the same to obtain.
Also, winning any Super Mario Bros. game without beating king bowser and every castle boss will be a tad problematic.
"Its just an applied dataset. Nothing magical. Nothing world-changing."
You have no instinct for science.
In Pac-Man, you die by touching ghosts. The one thing you want to NOT do, in a regular game of Pac-Man, is touch ghosts. As long as you don't touch any ghosts, you keep getting points.
That's the most basic understanding of the game you can have, what my four-year-old daughter would figure out in five minutes. That's also what the AI figured out.
*More advanced* players can learn the *exception* to the above simple rule. The *exception* is:
Only if you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds, touching ghosts becomes good.
It doesn't need to "learn not touching ghosts even though (in rare situations) it results in a higher score". It only needs to be too stupid to recognize the unusual conditions under which ghosts, which normally kill you, can instead raise your score. It uses the simple rule "don't touch ghosts, they kill you". Instead of the more complex "don't touch ghosts unless with the last 300 milliseconds ...".
to Do No Evil.
Ba-dum-tish.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Do read TFA again. They did multiple runs with different emphasis on having the AI emulate the human player who avoided ghosts.
The power pills still have strategic value when you don't want to eat the ghosts.
Nethack has both pacifist conduct and the ability for types of monsters to go extinct via too many of that monster type dying. People have pulled of pacifist extinctionist challenges, which is possible because in Nethack, deaths done by your character break pacifist conduct (e.g. spells, physical attacks, etc (there are a few exceptions)) but deaths via other means (your pet killing things, etc) do not.
Wow. I've always been fascinated by Nethack but the learning curve seems steep.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC