
The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go - shutterstock
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/sadness-beauty-watching-googles-ai-play-go/
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shkkmo
This may be off topic, but I dislike Wired's new approach to adBlockers. I use
Privacy Badger as my only adBlocker because I am fine with viewing adds if
they don't track me. Wired's approach just means I refresh the page, select
all the text and copy it into my text editor. Which is a shame because if they
would just display non-tracking ads I would happily view them. The way things
are going now if they ever make circumventing their restrictions to
burdensome, I may stop reading their articles, but I will not allow their ads
to track me.

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luckydude
Huh, I run AdBlocker or something and don't see any ads. I just give up on
sites that do what wired does, the content will show up somewhere else.

I used to feel guilty about it, people need to make a living, but the tracking
is creepy in the extreme and the ads got to be pretty invasive. If they made
ads that were fun or funny or insightful or had some value, that's different,
but they just seem annoying to me.

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matt_wulfeck
when I think about AI, I'm always reminded about glitches. For example,
finding a weird behavior that can be exploited in a video game to beat a boss
easily. It's one principle difference between playing other people and the
cpu: humans are able to evolve their strategies, experiment, etc.

For the AI to really be the best, it must sometimes lose because it's trying a
new strategy and experimenting. It also must be robust and find the error of
its way easily -- in other words, know quickly that it's being gamed.

AI must be able to reprogram itself, or it's only a matter of time before a
winning strategy comes out against it. If it can't reprogram itself and evolve
without humans is it really AI?

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wlesieutre
In some contexts, sure, humans will adjust their strategy when someone finds a
weakness to exploit against us. Other times, not so much. Ask any casino or
the folks over at King/Zynga. Objectively, walking into one of those games is
expected to be a losing strategy, but we've continued to do it for hundreds of
years. In other contexts like chess and Super Mario, maybe we do better.

But if we make a general purpose AI that can adapt against any discovered
winning strategies instead of falling into repeatedly losing, it won't be our
equal. It will have surpassed us.

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TrevorJ
Only a certain percentage of people are addicted to gambling. For many, it's a
simple calculus of the entertainment value. If 45 minutes of playing penny
slots is worth the 10 bucks or whatever then they do it. I do agree with your
general thesis though, there's definitely some areas where our logical
abilities short circuit.

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wlesieutre
What if the video game AI decides that losing a boss fight by getting stabbed
repeatedly by a player who glitched through a wall is _totally hilarious_ and
more fun that fighting? Bug? Or just an AI doing AI things?

We have squishier heuristics for what "winning" is compared to AlphaGo, and
that seems likely to stay true for the foreseeable future of specialized AIs.
But someday it might not.

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d0100
I think the only ones that are "sad" are those who saw Go very
philosophically, like if it was more then just a game with set rules that can
be computed.

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nsns
Right, just as the sadness of seeing a notepad and pen beat human memory.

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brownbat
Agreed. Ancient Grecian bards once memorized the Oddessey forwards, backwards,
and skipping every third word to ensure integrity. At that time, writing was
thought of as dulling the mind.

Speaking of Greek stories, Paris shooting Achilles is another classic one of
technology defeating technique.

This has been a bittersweet human story for a very long time.

