Computer Learns Language By Playing Games 133
Frans Faase writes "By basing its strategies on the text of a manual, a computer infers the meanings of words without human supervision. The paper Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework (PDF) explains how a computer program succeeds in playing Civilization II using the official game manual as a strategy guide. This manual uses a large vocabulary of 3638 words, and is composed of 2083 sentences, each on average 16.9 words long. By this the program improves it success rate from 45% to 78% in playing the game. No prior knowledge of the language is used."
A proper job for computers (Score:5, Funny)
Computers have always been good for doing tedious jobs that people don't want to do.
Like reading manuals.
Re:delta between manual and no manual (Score:4, Funny)
Section 6 of the paper seems to imply that even the most illiterate fool would still win about 30% more games by having a copy of the manual, no matter how illiterate they are.
I just like to look at the pictures.
Re:A strategy to use... (Score:5, Funny)
in schools? Get kids reading decent manuals (text-books) and perhaps they may actually learn something and find they can do decent things with the new-found knowledge.
This probably dates myself quite accurately, but pretty much, Infocom taught me how to read and type.
It has its side effects, saying "inv" when I look in my wallet, saying "save" before I do something dangerous, but overall it worked pretty well.
Re:A strategy to use... (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed, I make daily use of the differences between a partisan, ranseur, glaive, guisarme, glaive-guisarm, guisarm-glaive, lucern hammer, military fork, volge, etc.
Re:My kids learned language playing games too. (Score:2, Funny)
Well, double dumb ass on you!
Re:My kids learned language playing games too. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A strategy to use... (Score:3, Funny)
Rocks and snow, uphill, both ways ... we had it tough I tell you. ;-)
That's what we get for letting Escher on the city planning committee...