Perfect chess involves alot more than responding with a given move in response to a given board setup. The history of moves that got one to a given position can be just as important in that it exposes the mindset and intentions of the opponent.
This is going to be a stumbling block for computers for awhile, but it looks like brute force might be enough for now. I'm predicting though, that human chess players will adapt and learn how to beat some chess machines.
I skimmed it quickly and my brain must have automatically filled in the word Jon Katz for the author slot. I must have forgotten to disble the paperclip.
Well something like this is going to be necessary as our population continues to explode. Life once again imitates Simcity. When are we going to put Maxis in charge of city planning here in the US?
I wonder if myoelectric fibers(a technology pulled straight from my ass that sounds plausible) that run the entire height of the building could generate significant energy as the thing wobbles 8 feet back and forth at its peak. I know it's not a huge wobble, but it's quite a massive distance (half a mile!), and obviously alot of energy is going to be absorbed by the thing as it moves.
But I think in practice it would prove difficult. Mining data from a set with so much variance in player skill would prove very difficult. And again, you still have the problem that figuring out a huge array of optimal variables is not going to give you a good AI. It will be better, probably, but still woefully inferior to a human. It all comes down to foresight and insight. Until we can put that into an AI, forget it.
Actually, one way to make AI's challenging is to paly to the computer's strengths, real time games with lots of things to do are great for computers because they can handle it all. A human needs the game to go at a certain pace or they lose it.
So Europa Universalis, for example, is a game that is much more difficult to win at if you don't allow pausing.
I'd rather it did cheat than provide such an easy win. The scenarios are incredibly complex and challenging at the outset. But over time, human victory is assured if you can hold out long enough.
It would be a great multiplayer game, but its nature isn't very easy to multiplay with.
I'm aware that a perceptron is a neural net, but being limited to one layer really gimps its ability to generalize.
But I think you sell neural nets short, while they are pattern recognizers, they are capable of finding extremely complex relationships between variables, relationships that are hard to code as boolean values.
That could be(re Hebbian), but my gut feeling is that they have figured out a tight and complete set of outputs and have figured out a way to use the error signal of god feedback to adjust the weights.
But you're probably right that a back prop net would require a more uniform spread of the input space to accurately capture what it needs to.
I guess what I'd most like to see is a way to use multi level networks, backprop or no. The capabilities of a perceptron are fairly meager, it can't even do XOR, which one would think is a fairly basic tenet of a decent AI.
That article just struck me in the way it waved around these very basic AI techniques as if they were something to be proud of.
But you can't argue with results. B&W is definitely interesting to alot of people, so they got something right.
The outputs for a perceptron must also be known. The difference between a perceptron and a back prop, AFAIK is that there are multiple layers in a backprop, and therefore you need a more complex training algorithm to propagate the error backwards.
It's not that the developers are stupid, they know how to play their game and they can usually fill in decent values for all of those variables.
The problem is that being good at a strategy game involves much more than the variables you list. Learning to plan out attacks and spot weakness are not things that the AI can easily do, nor pick up from observation of a person playing.
These are the achilles heel of AI in a strategy game, and there is no simple fix.
By design time I meant the amount of time people spend working on the AI, as opposed to the CPU resources it eats up while the game is running. This includes testing/tweaking.
CPU's these days are more capable of provididing good AI than they are given credit for. In my opinion, it not a CPU bottleneck that has kept AI at.1% of system resources, rather it's design time. The amount of human time required to develop and debug a proper AI, one that makes a significant use of computational resources, is enormous.
Therefore, it's done half-assed. I don't blame the developers for this, they are operating in a market in which the average selling game loses money, so they are under alot of pressure to cut corners. Truth to be told, a crappy AI is probably not going to cripple sales of your game too much (unless that's the central theme like B&W).
We're going to need to see the computer industry actually become profitable before we see more decent AI like B&W.
Note thet B&W was developed with personal cash from Peter, and therefore wasn't subject to the same tight budget/publishing requirements that most games are.
It's a credit to Lionhead that they got the product out the door without a publisher breathing down their neck.
"decisions trees have not been used in games before".
I'm willing to bet that's a load of bull. Maybe noone called it a "decision tree" but I'm sure there have been AI structures that perform exactly the same function in some game, somewhere. There have been *alot* of games, and they have explored *alot* of options. Maybe they didn't have 6 million dollars of personal cash make them famous like B&W, but they were still there.
I was glad to see him acknowledging its limitations though.
What he describes is nothing special to the AI world, very basic techniques. I'd like to see something more complex, perhaps a backprop neural net and adaptive planner (which would give them foresight) instead of a perceptron and a decision tree. For a single creature, the CPU hit would be trivial. The real limitation is the human time required to design it.
The crucial flaw in your argument is that you are attempting to apply relativism/tolerance, etc absolutely.
Relativism has to be handled with care. Decisions need to be made carefuly and with forethought. You cannot apply it completely and expect everything to work out.
This is the basic problem of life in general, the only real solutions are compromises between extremes. Neither the political left, nor the right has the answers, the extreme version of either would be terrible for us.
This is woefully off topic, and I'm wondering how you found license to write this as a reply in this thread, but I'll bite.
Rarely have I read such a long winded and amateurish attack on evolution/atheism.
For the moment, I'm going to lump the two together since you do, although realize that there are alot of god fearing people who believe in guided evolution.
Under a purely atheistic framework, it is indeed true that the concept of moral absolutes goes out the window, but that's about the only thing you got right.
Check out this gem:
"the philosophy and religion of Atheism and Evolution says that murder, theft, rape, etc. are okay"
They certainly do not say they are ok. Morals and ethics in an atheistic framework have to be recoded in a non-absolute/rational sense. We're sort of locked in a large prisoner's dilemna in which our co-players are the entire human race. The optimal return rate for everyone is to not commit these crimes, and therefore it is in our best interests to dissuade them through teaching, support and sometimes punishment.
You have a severe bunker mentality that is becoming more prevalent in the religious of America these days, who perceive themselves coming under attack.
Well get over it. Open your eyes and your mind. Try to find compromise and cooperate with the "other side". If you truly have faith in God, doing this shouldn't scare you. If you truly have faith in God, you wouldn't be getting defensive and abusive in the face of evolution and atheism.
I can only conclude from your remarks that your faith in God is not absolute, and to compensate you lash out.
Confront your misgivings, if there truly is a God, he will show you the way.
I wonder if you force your browser to display all characters in braille(sp?) if this device would have sufficient resolution to allow one to read a web page?
It still might be cumbersome for reading a long file, but for navigating pages with sidebars, such as slashdot, it could work fairly well.
Other adaptations to browsers could include special color enhancement for the borders of buttons and menus that caused them to be easily identifiable by feel.
I'm evisioning a pre-installed blind-mode for web browsers that one could activate with standards across platforms.
Such modifications could also be applied to desktop themes for windows Mac or Unix systems.
AMD processors are sooo good, and P4's are sooo expensive, that I don't think even half price is going to shift the balance in favor of the P4.
Although I am surprised to see such a radical move. Maybe the arsenal of benchmarks showing how crappy the P4 is finally got through to upper management.
This guy is making his judgements by looking at the back of the box and seeing what the apps minimum requirements are.
Now, if you haven't played a computer game in the last 5 years, let me tell you that requirements are a joke. Sure it will *execute*, the code will "run". Hell even the recommended system will be sluggish at times for alot of current games.
The motive for game publishers to push the specs as low as possible is simple: the higher the Mhz number on the box, the fewer people will buy it.
Now there may be a point to this article, I can't think of anything at the moment that requires a ghz chip, apart from my data analysis. Game developers are scared to target a Ghz platform because they know sales will be pitiful( and note that a game targetted at 1ghz will probably have a minimum speed of 500-600 on the box, so even then this fellow's "in depth" research would turn up nothing)
First point I'll make is that hot or not caters to men and women (or at least it did when I checked it out).
Second point is that you are taking this far too seriously. My vote as one of several thousand on whether I think someone is cute is addictive like heroin? Are you listening to yourself?
Rest assured, the internet has far worse dangers than Hot or not. Fortunately, no matter how much people like you bitch about them, they won't go away.
I've been steering people clear of the IV
on
Pentium IV study
·
· Score: 2
Since it came out I've been advising friends and coworkers to stick with the III's or Athlons until the IV gets its act together. Nice to see I wasn't blowing smoke.
But the sheer percentage of these people who were going to buy a P IV if I hadn't said something is a testament to Intel's strategy. People are going to buy it just because of the name.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea I forgot about that.
Perfect chess involves alot more than responding with a given move in response to a given board setup. The history of moves that got one to a given position can be just as important in that it exposes the mindset and intentions of the opponent.
This is going to be a stumbling block for computers for awhile, but it looks like brute force might be enough for now. I'm predicting though, that human chess players will adapt and learn how to beat some chess machines.
I skimmed it quickly and my brain must have automatically filled in the word Jon Katz for the author slot. I must have forgotten to disble the paperclip.
This was a Star Trek episode. :)
Well something like this is going to be necessary as our population continues to explode. Life once again imitates Simcity. When are we going to put Maxis in charge of city planning here in the US?
I wonder if myoelectric fibers(a technology pulled straight from my ass that sounds plausible) that run the entire height of the building could generate significant energy as the thing wobbles 8 feet back and forth at its peak. I know it's not a huge wobble, but it's quite a massive distance (half a mile!), and obviously alot of energy is going to be absorbed by the thing as it moves.
But I think in practice it would prove difficult. Mining data from a set with so much variance in player skill would prove very difficult. And again, you still have the problem that figuring out a huge array of optimal variables is not going to give you a good AI. It will be better, probably, but still woefully inferior to a human. It all comes down to foresight and insight. Until we can put that into an AI, forget it.
Actually, one way to make AI's challenging is to paly to the computer's strengths, real time games with lots of things to do are great for computers because they can handle it all. A human needs the game to go at a certain pace or they lose it.
So Europa Universalis, for example, is a game that is much more difficult to win at if you don't allow pausing.
I'd rather it did cheat than provide such an easy win. The scenarios are incredibly complex and challenging at the outset. But over time, human victory is assured if you can hold out long enough.
It would be a great multiplayer game, but its nature isn't very easy to multiplay with.
I'm aware that a perceptron is a neural net, but being limited to one layer really gimps its ability to generalize.
But I think you sell neural nets short, while they are pattern recognizers, they are capable of finding extremely complex relationships between variables, relationships that are hard to code as boolean values.
That could be(re Hebbian), but my gut feeling is that they have figured out a tight and complete set of outputs and have figured out a way to use the error signal of god feedback to adjust the weights.
But you're probably right that a back prop net would require a more uniform spread of the input space to accurately capture what it needs to.
I guess what I'd most like to see is a way to use multi level networks, backprop or no. The capabilities of a perceptron are fairly meager, it can't even do XOR, which one would think is a fairly basic tenet of a decent AI.
That article just struck me in the way it waved around these very basic AI techniques as if they were something to be proud of.
But you can't argue with results. B&W is definitely interesting to alot of people, so they got something right.
The outputs for a perceptron must also be known. The difference between a perceptron and a back prop, AFAIK is that there are multiple layers in a backprop, and therefore you need a more complex training algorithm to propagate the error backwards.
But they both rely on error correction to learn.
Of course they cheat. The only modern strat game I'm aware of that doesn't cheat is Europa Universalis and the AI is disappointingly easy to beat.
It's not that the developers are stupid, they know how to play their game and they can usually fill in decent values for all of those variables.
The problem is that being good at a strategy game involves much more than the variables you list. Learning to plan out attacks and spot weakness are not things that the AI can easily do, nor pick up from observation of a person playing.
These are the achilles heel of AI in a strategy game, and there is no simple fix.
By design time I meant the amount of time people spend working on the AI, as opposed to the CPU resources it eats up while the game is running. This includes testing/tweaking.
CPU's these days are more capable of provididing good AI than they are given credit for. In my opinion, it not a CPU bottleneck that has kept AI at .1% of system resources, rather it's design time. The amount of human time required to develop and debug a proper AI, one that makes a significant use of computational resources, is enormous.
Therefore, it's done half-assed. I don't blame the developers for this, they are operating in a market in which the average selling game loses money, so they are under alot of pressure to cut corners. Truth to be told, a crappy AI is probably not going to cripple sales of your game too much (unless that's the central theme like B&W).
We're going to need to see the computer industry actually become profitable before we see more decent AI like B&W.
Note thet B&W was developed with personal cash from Peter, and therefore wasn't subject to the same tight budget/publishing requirements that most games are.
It's a credit to Lionhead that they got the product out the door without a publisher breathing down their neck.
"decisions trees have not been used in games before".
I'm willing to bet that's a load of bull. Maybe noone called it a "decision tree" but I'm sure there have been AI structures that perform exactly the same function in some game, somewhere. There have been *alot* of games, and they have explored *alot* of options. Maybe they didn't have 6 million dollars of personal cash make them famous like B&W, but they were still there.
I was glad to see him acknowledging its limitations though.
What he describes is nothing special to the AI world, very basic techniques. I'd like to see something more complex, perhaps a backprop neural net and adaptive planner (which would give them foresight) instead of a perceptron and a decision tree. For a single creature, the CPU hit would be trivial. The real limitation is the human time required to design it.
The crucial flaw in your argument is that you are attempting to apply relativism/tolerance, etc absolutely.
Relativism has to be handled with care. Decisions need to be made carefuly and with forethought. You cannot apply it completely and expect everything to work out.
This is the basic problem of life in general, the only real solutions are compromises between extremes. Neither the political left, nor the right has the answers, the extreme version of either would be terrible for us.
This is woefully off topic, and I'm wondering how you found license to write this as a reply in this thread, but I'll bite.
Rarely have I read such a long winded and amateurish attack on evolution/atheism.
For the moment, I'm going to lump the two together since you do, although realize that there are alot of god fearing people who believe in guided evolution.
Under a purely atheistic framework, it is indeed true that the concept of moral absolutes goes out the window, but that's about the only thing you got right.
Check out this gem:
"the philosophy and religion of Atheism and Evolution says that murder, theft, rape, etc. are okay"
They certainly do not say they are ok. Morals and ethics in an atheistic framework have to be recoded in a non-absolute/rational sense. We're sort of locked in a large prisoner's dilemna in which our co-players are the entire human race. The optimal return rate for everyone is to not commit these crimes, and therefore it is in our best interests to dissuade them through teaching, support and sometimes punishment.
You have a severe bunker mentality that is becoming more prevalent in the religious of America these days, who perceive themselves coming under attack.
Well get over it. Open your eyes and your mind. Try to find compromise and cooperate with the "other side". If you truly have faith in God, doing this shouldn't scare you. If you truly have faith in God, you wouldn't be getting defensive and abusive in the face of evolution and atheism.
I can only conclude from your remarks that your faith in God is not absolute, and to compensate you lash out.
Confront your misgivings, if there truly is a God, he will show you the way.
I wonder if you force your browser to display all characters in braille(sp?) if this device would have sufficient resolution to allow one to read a web page?
It still might be cumbersome for reading a long file, but for navigating pages with sidebars, such as slashdot, it could work fairly well.
Other adaptations to browsers could include special color enhancement for the borders of buttons and menus that caused them to be easily identifiable by feel.
I'm evisioning a pre-installed blind-mode for web browsers that one could activate with standards across platforms.
Such modifications could also be applied to desktop themes for windows Mac or Unix systems.
Read the end, he isn't serious. Give him a Funny or 3.
As a previous replier indicated, your keen powers of prediction have failed you. Maybe you shouldn't trust your pre-judgements so much.
It's not cheesy and it's anti-clmactic. So much happens in the end that I'm wondering if you missed something.
AMD processors are sooo good, and P4's are sooo expensive, that I don't think even half price is going to shift the balance in favor of the P4.
Although I am surprised to see such a radical move. Maybe the arsenal of benchmarks showing how crappy the P4 is finally got through to upper management.
This guy is making his judgements by looking at the back of the box and seeing what the apps minimum requirements are.
Now, if you haven't played a computer game in the last 5 years, let me tell you that requirements are a joke. Sure it will *execute*, the code will "run". Hell even the recommended system will be sluggish at times for alot of current games.
The motive for game publishers to push the specs as low as possible is simple: the higher the Mhz number on the box, the fewer people will buy it.
Now there may be a point to this article, I can't think of anything at the moment that requires a ghz chip, apart from my data analysis. Game developers are scared to target a Ghz platform because they know sales will be pitiful( and note that a game targetted at 1ghz will probably have a minimum speed of 500-600 on the box, so even then this fellow's "in depth" research would turn up nothing)
First point I'll make is that hot or not caters to men and women (or at least it did when I checked it out). Second point is that you are taking this far too seriously. My vote as one of several thousand on whether I think someone is cute is addictive like heroin? Are you listening to yourself? Rest assured, the internet has far worse dangers than Hot or not. Fortunately, no matter how much people like you bitch about them, they won't go away.
Since it came out I've been advising friends and coworkers to stick with the III's or Athlons until the IV gets its act together. Nice to see I wasn't blowing smoke.
But the sheer percentage of these people who were going to buy a P IV if I hadn't said something is a testament to Intel's strategy. People are going to buy it just because of the name.