Video Games Are So Realistic That They Can Teach AI What the World Looks Like (vice.com) 87
Jordan Pearson, reporting for Motherboard:Thanks to the modern gaming industry, we can now spend our evenings wandering around photorealistic game worlds, like the post-apocalyptic Boston of Fallout 4 or Grand Theft Auto V's Los Santos, instead of doing things like "seeing people" and "engaging in human interaction of any kind." Games these days are so realistic, in fact, that artificial intelligence researchers are using them to teach computers how to recognize objects in real life. Not only that, but commercial video games could kick artificial intelligence research into high gear by dramatically lessening the time and money required to train AI. "If you go back to the original Doom, the walls all look exactly the same and it's very easy to predict what a wall looks like, given that data," said Mark Schmidt, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). "But if you go into the real world, where every wall looks different, it might not work anymore." Schmidt works with machine learning, a technique that allows computers to "train" on a large set of labelled data -- photographs of streets, for example -- so that when let loose in the real world, they can recognize, or "predict," what they're looking at. Schmidt and Alireza Shafaei, a PhD student at UBC, recently studied Grand Theft Auto V and found that self-learning software trained on images from the game performed just as well, and in some cases even better, than software trained on real photos from publicly available datasets.
let's play Global Thermonuclear War! (Score:3)
What side do you want?
China
France
Russia
UK
USA
India
Israel
Pakistan
North Korea
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True story: the Canadians named their intercontinental ballistic missiles after Guy Lefleur.
[OK, it's not really a true story, but it would be so cool if it were.]
Re: All good then (Score:2)
Google should train an AI to drive using GTA and stick it in one of their cars. It will drastically reduce the time it will take to train autonomous vehicles.
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They are already planning for that. The codename for the AI has just been published, it's "Christine".
Sounds really nice!
Does the AI know fear... (Score:2)
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You don't think at all, you're just a bunch of neural circuits.
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You really bought in hard to that whole "things will never change" mantra, didn't you? Is there some bookie that will let you bet your 401k on progress not occurring, or something? Why are you so insistent on trying to explain to people how their fantasies of progress occurring are based on mythology and magic?
Congratulations on your Nobel, by the way.
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Oh, OK. So an "AI nutter" apparently believes that AI will "magically appear", because PCs got faster over 26 years. I didn't realize that you could distill their beliefs down to something that sounds so stupid, but I guess you're the expert.
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Ah, that explains it... I haven't realized that was the origin of his statements, but I guess you're right. The irony in his "Oh so you know how the brain works?" is that I've actually been studying it for a long time, so yeah, I have a good idea about the generals. :p
But after the "Wow, when did you receive your Nobel?", it's easy to see how his brain works - it doesn't! :p
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Re:Does the AI know fear... (Score:4, Insightful)
We tried neural nets back then. Didn't work.
It seems it is you that are stuck in 1960, because connectionist techniques nowadays are nothing like that. And deep-learning has been breaking record after record, even achieving superhuman performance in some tasks. And deep-learning is just a smart math trick over the regular backprop algorithm, allowing more layers without degrading the error gradients. When the models that actually incorporate neuroscientific knowledge (current research) mature, expect even better performances.
And wtf, this "I tried once, I failed, I'll never try again" is surely a loser-talk.
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Wait, you're not trying to suggest that we didn't know all that there was to know in 1960, are you? We were using chemical propellant for rockets then, are you really trying to suggest that we did NOT understand all that there was to understand back in 1960? That maybe we were missing something? Because that doesn't sound like you at all.
No, you're wrong about this. Chemical propellant is the pinnacle of space launch technology, the brain is a bunch of neural circuits, we already knew all of this in the
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If there was something better we would be using it rather than using chemical rockets FOR THE LAST 60 YEARS.
Listen, when we were doing that thing where we parodied each others' positions in the other story, and I said exactly what you just said, that was supposed to be comedy, man. That's satire. The notion that we would have known in the 60s all of the physics necessary to accomplish any kind of travel through space/time is laughable, ridiculous, and obviously satire. You shouldn't repeat it like you actually think that, it makes you sound incredibly short-sighted. You are turning into that person where it's
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Wait, you're not trying to suggest that we didn't know all that there was to know in 1960, are you? We were using chemical propellant for rockets then,
I'm curious - what are we using now as rocket propellant?
As far as the AI argument goes: The processing power in the world the last 3 decades has increased by a factor of a few hundreds of thousands. The "AI" has improved by a factor of 2. Maybe less. The progress we've seen in AI software has been incremental; a rounding error compared to progress in other software or in hardware, and we've yet to approach the cognitive abilities of a smart cockroach, even though we're consuming orders of magnitude more p
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What's the difference?
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Says the guy who doesn't know the difference between quite and quiet. Not to mention that a winking emoji is not a proper way to close a sentence. Just to be clear: you're missing a period there, Mr. not-a-fucking-idiot.
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An interrogatory sentence should end with a question mark.
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It isn't the hardware that's the problem - it's the software and the Wetware [wikipedia.org]
Faster processors can help a little, but better algorithms are what is required. Apparently there is no money in AI. The best minds of our generation are being paid to work out how to get a user to click on an advert.
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Although you are right about the poor quality of what passes for "research" nowadays, people need to realize that there are limits to technology. It doesn't increase in power and get better and better indefinitely. There are limits based on Physics and engineering. Particularly with digital computers we are hitting those limits now. CPUs in particular are only getting marginally faster with each (expensive) generation.
The brain is a parallel system. Computers are getting more parallel. There's a long way to go before we throw up our hands and say "this is impossible". If you were running the show we'd never have got out of the caves.
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The SR-71 is still the fastest plane ever built.
That doesn't mean that it's not possible to build a faster plane. There's no reason to build one at this point. You don't need a plane capable of outrunning any missile when you can take pictures with a satellite instead. You don't even need a plane that fast for carrying people when we haven't even attempted to handle the legislation involved with supersonic passenger travel. We didn't lose any capability after the SR-71 was retired, the capability had already been replaced by the time the last ones we
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You don't even need a plane that fast for carrying people when we haven't even attempted to handle the legislation involved with supersonic passenger travel.
Uh, Concorde? From what I understood it's the market that killed it, with modern communication via email and video conferencing the business market became considerably smaller. You of course have the luxury market but they don't necessarily travel between major business hubs very often, they're often going more exotic places. It needs economic solutions to bring the cost down and technological solutions for the sonic boom so it can go over land and not be such a special case, the legislation is the least pr
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The legislation is a major man-made problem. If you have planes flying all over the country producing sonic booms, people are going to sue and that's what is going to stop it. Your suggestion of a technological solution to stop the sonic boom sounds great, but I don't see how that's possible without engines producing virtually no sound yet still strong enough to propel something several hundred tons faster than the speed of sound.
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There is a problem with our scientists today.
The problem is capitalism. Optimizing for cost gets a technically inferior solution.
The SR-71 is still the fastest plane ever built.
It's the fastest manned aircraft that launches from the ground under its own power and runs on JP-7 fuel. Remove any one of those constraints, and there is something faster, though none are in use, as they are too expensive, and anything you can do with an SR-71, you can do cheaper with a drone or satellite. The SR-71 existed so that we could take pictures without losing pilots. Drones fit that bill and are much cheaper.
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Closed (Score:2)
So, on one side, you have the game program converting conceptual objects from a database to 3D images, using a powerful GPU in the process.
And in the other side you have the AI program taking that 3D image and converting it to a conceptual object, and putting it in a database, using a powerful GPU in the process.
And then you wonder about global warming.
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You're comparing apples and oranges.
One is a forward transformation.
The other is the reverse transformation.
Mapping between the two is non-trivial.
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I think you missed the point. Read it again. He isn't saying simulation is bad - he is saying THIS method is bad.
He's still wrong. Here's the original comment:
The rebuttal is not that it doesn't consume energy, but that this is a brain damaged way to look at it because
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The intermediate step
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Current technology of CMOS gates shows roughly the same energy per transition as a neuron (given similar levels of complexity.) Since AI uses so much power for such marginal results, this implies that computer hardware is not properly designed/optimized for intelligence work or that AI software is woefully wrong (or both).
Brain cells and brains as a whole aren't magical; they work by some mechanism. Equivalents of all mechanisms can be made by digital logic systems, but we don't know how to make the equival
GTA (Score:3)
Good. We need AI that can correctly identify a person as a prostitute and various fictional weaponry and automobiles.
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Fantastic! (Score:3)
Now the fleets of self driving cars will be sipping "hot coffee" and beating the hookers to collect their money back for services rendered.
They will also know how to rack up a respectable 5 start wanted level and just hide under a bridge till it all goes away.
Oh, and my favorite new autonomous feature? Spawning attack choppers out of thin air to aid in robbing every convenience store in the city while performing the above two tasks.
Talos Principle! (Score:2)
The Talos Principle is coming to life!