
DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too - gameoflife
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html
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yodon
As discussed earlier this week (with link to technical paper)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20055162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20055162)

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mark_l_watson
While I am a fan of DeepMind’s research (Alpha Go and Alpha Zero blew me away
- I wrote a commercial Go program in the late 1970s for the Apple II so I
appreciate the problem, and I used to work with DeepMind cofounder Shane Legg
at Webmind), respectfully, I do have a criticism:

I would like to see them use their talent and financial backing from Alphabet
to tackle the hard problems of common sense in AI and in general the science
of what it will take to reach AGI.

Deep learning is brittle, as can be seen in the good science of finding
adversarial attacks on trained models. I would like to see less accuracy on
dev and test sets, smaller more general models, and especially not see
convolutional models as the basis for vision systems in self driving cars. My
intuition is that discarding information of relative positions and relative
relationships of large features in an image is a bad idea for the self driving
car problem.

They have really pushed progress for an old technology (reinforcement
learning) and achieved fantastic results but in my experience if there are not
many failures along the way, then perhaps goals are not being set high enough.

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gameoflife
People mentioned in the article seem to doubt about applicability in the real
world. If nothing else, I think it brings video game development closer to
being an automated process. A game could simulate various conditions and
design an infinite number of complex environments. Am I way off?

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drchewbacca
I saw an interesting talk about proc gen which was basically saying a lot of
studios are moving from hand crafting to procedural tools. For example if you
want to fill a park with trees you don't place them by hand, you just specify
the density and type of trees and let the computer place them. The advantage
is that if you want to reshape the park later you can just click and drag.
Then when you are happy you go though and hand craft more content on top.

They were saying there is a critical mass where procedural tools feed into
procedural tools and a lot of the pipeline is automated, then it becomes
extremely cheap to make more content.

So back to your point: I think this is where we will see AI more in game dev,
it will be as smart tools to empower creators to make stuff more easily. I
don't think the AI will make the game, I think it will assist the humans with
the creation of it.

Here is a talk about Spiderman and how much proc gen they used there
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aw9uyj9MAE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aw9uyj9MAE)

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close04
An important detail is missing from the article (or perhaps I missed it). The
AI had an advantage unrelated to intelligence. It's "plugged" into the game in
a way that gives it a big advantage. Better reaction time, better aim,
technical capabilities that a human player with "primitive" input devices and
looking at the game through a low res window can't get close to.

Unlike a game of chess where the mind is basically the only one at work, this
time the "body" might have had just as much of an input. Even regular bots
were good enough for most players anyway :).

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wickoff
People said the same thing about DeepMind's SC2 wins. Its actions per minute
spiked to inhuman levels briefly and its efficiency and precision of control
was nearly perfect. These types of criticisms completely miss the point.

People were attempting to build StarCraft agents for 10 years. 50000 actions
per minute, complete vision of the entire map, predefined scripted build
orders, restrictions on human opponents - nothing worked. A moderately
competent player would destroy those old bots in 10 out of 10 games, it wasn't
close.

These games have so much more to them than reaction time and dexterity, these
new agents are doing something that simply wasn't possible before.

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close04
> These games have so much more to them than reaction time and dexterity

Sure but they're still an important part of the end result which most people
don't consider. For many the title just says "AI beats human mind". If you
want to know which mind is better then compare minds, all else equal.

"Dumb" bots have been kicking player's butts for years now. Not because of
intelligence but because everything else was not equal: great aim, great
reaction time, great situational awareness. So aren't you curious how much the
"intelligence" part evolved?

Imagine a 100m sprint where one of the runners has to wear army boots and
backpack. Would you even bother drawing a conclusion?

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aelhaji
So when can we expect DeepMind vs OpenAI?

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sorenn111
You know that'd be really interesting as spectacle (in my opinion). You'd pick
a game that neither company has worked on and pit them against one another.

From a research standpoint though, it'd be a waste of time.

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simcop2387
It wouldn't be a waste of research on that game. But for the broader community
it might effectively be. I think it'd be a great way to setup a competition
among grad students though.

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JulianMorrison
Nobody ask it if it would like a game of global thermonuclear war.

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Zenst
A benchmark for me would be a game that can handle a MMOPG like eve-online.
What with certain tactics in game valid - like griefing, spies etc. An AI can
handle that would be not only impressive, but learn a set of skills that many
would feel uncomfortable about being within the realms of AI.

After all, humans cheat, would we want that allowed by an AI. Equally an AI
could stumble upon an exploit in a game and not realise it is an expliot - ie
item duplication.

But this opens up a whole new aspect of gaming that AI has yet to touch that
I'm aware of.

Though I feel we are still a way of from having computers with a moral-
coprocessor, and still very much early days with AI. But that is certainly
something that is within our lifetimes.

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781
> _A benchmark for me would be a game that can handle a MMOPG like eve-online_

I don't think they managed to connect Excel to their game environments yet.

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Zenst
MMOPG's are not all reducible into an Excel spreadsheet and the part were I
said "What with certain tactics in game valid - like griefing, spies etc. An
AI can handle that would be not only impressive, but learn a set of skills
that many would feel uncomfortable about being within the realms of AI." was
the part I was discussing.

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akeck
Multi-player games like combat?

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MR4D
SkyNet is alive!

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MR4D
Not sure why I got downvoted so badly on this.

The reference is simple: SkyNet fought war, and a war is a type of multiplayer
game.

Am I missing something?

