

A computer that learns the rules of a game by watching you play - mrsebastian
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132558-a-computer-that-learns-the-rules-of-a-game-by-watching-you-play

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mjn
The linked paper is worth reading, and an interesting extension to inductive
logic programming (ILP), a symbolic-logic-based approach to generalizing from
examples.

The more general idea of learning from watching someone play isn't _that_ new,
but it's usually in more restricted contexts. For example, the system may be
preprogrammed with the rules of chess, and then learns how to play chess
_well_ from logs of expert play. The work here has some pretty clever
representations to allow it to start with a general hypothesis of any board-
like game and then narrow down the rules of a particular game by observation.

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trurl
This is actually very old idea. I remember some game creator program on the
Apple II that you could teach games. Probably nothing as sophisticated as
chess, but maybe tic-tac-toe and connect four. Unfortunately, this was over
twenty years ago, so the name is lost to me at the moment. I'll update if I
can find it.

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mserdarsanli
I wonder if it would succeed on such a game <http://xkcd.com/91/>

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sneak
> PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR

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bazzargh
I don't like the idea that it needs to watch us do this first.

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waterhouse
Using chess as an example, and not knowing how the program works, I idly
wonder if it would pick up such oddities as: en pessant pawn captures, being
unable to castle out of check or to castle across check (e.g. White attempts
to castle kingside but Black is attacking f1), the fifty-move rule (I expect
it would get threefold repetition), and perhaps even the fact that you can
promote pawns to pieces other than queens.

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bluesnowmonkey
Much like how a human learns a game by watching people play. For instance, I
learned chess casually by watching people play when I was a kid, and I just
now found out about en passant pawn captures. (Thanks!)

