Category Archives: games

CURIOSITY PARADIGM OF INTELLIGENCE gains traction! via open AI + deepmind + google brain

My view is throw it all away and start again. —Hinton[x]

⭐ 😮 ❗ 💡 😎 ❤ hi all. blogged about a curiosity-based AGI theory in early 2018 after being inspired by recent Deepmind Go advances. the title was “novelty detection/ seeking”. the short word for that is curiosity. “curiously” the word “curious” didnt appear in the essay a single time. thinking back, suspect my thinking was that maybe the term was too advanced/ bold at the time. its a relatively abstract concept not even fully understood in neurobiology or psychology. it also crosses the species boundaries to other animals besides humans ie a general biological consideration also.

but now its time to use that word. the machine learning field has discovered curiosity in a big way… both locally and more globally.

the futures already here, its just not evenly distributed. —Gibson

the field of ML is very vast, grown rapidly in the last few years (esp wrt deep learning), and its not easy to keep track of these days. its something of a minor obsession for me and track it daily and over several years in this blog, almost since the beginning, via hundreds of links a year. did not run into some key references myself, and that shows how broad the field is and how hard it is even for dedicated/ committed individual researchers to keep up. but theres another element, curiosity was, and to some degree still is, “flying below the radar”.

this blog is timed based on some renewed attention and traction. the researchers in the field are definitely starting to notice something. they are still scattered but theyre the leaders, the pioneers, and suspect a mass herd shift is in the near future/ horizon (say within a few years) just like what happened with ML/ deep learning explosion/ wave itself in the last few years.

so in brief, thats exciting! the Curiosity Paradigm of Intelligence is gaining unmistakable signs of traction. this blog tracks some of those new milestones. yes its been studied for decades and by others, but the core/ nearly radical new theory/ proposal here (not entirely espoused by the following researchers, but aligned/ close) is that curiosity is necessary and sufficient for intelligence.

have been advocating/ promoting/ proseletyzing it myself in cyberspace heavily and got a lot of views on my blog. can be sure it is influencing some. also promote it on reddit and for that, earned some serious resistance there, some battle scars in cyberspace (oops/ yikes “promote” is nearly a 4-letter word in certain quarters of cyberspace that supposedly uphold/ glorify/ exist/ have entire business models based on user-generated-content!). but also a lot of excellent/ positive/ pointed feedback from redditors. thx for that guys!

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AI 2017 part 2 highlights/ trends

secret/ blueprint/ path to AGI: novelty detection/ seeking

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hi all. kurzweil wrote in 2006 “the singularity is near”. foreboding words! but today, still maybe more of a feeling than a fact. definitely, the AI field has started to mature into a new steady advance period/ era in the last few years, also with a burst of energy/ enthusiasm/ innovation heralded by the Google Deepmind acquisition in 2014, and other massive shifts toward increased investment by large corporations and govts. the Musk Open AI initiative was announced in 2015.

the other massive milestone is the ready conquering of Go by Google in 2016 by AlphaGo. in late 2017, a new version AlphaZero was announced that plays superior to AlphaGo (at “beyond human grandmaster level”) after learning merely from the rules and reinforcement learning, ie no example human-level play presented as training whatsoever. AlphaZero also plays grandmaster level chess after learning “from scratch”. this breakthrough is not fully/ widely appreciated in some ways. it is the first case of a potentially more general algorithm for AI emerging from “previously relatively narrow” study of AI in games.

AI has the terminology “weak AI” and “strong AI” for different levels/ sophistication/ “ability”. more recently the term AGI, Artificial General Intelligence has been coined.

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AI 2017 — poker milestone passed/ crumbled

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hi all. AI technology is really exploding in the last few years. the last big post/ compilation on the subj here was ~½ year ago and the links piled up in a blur since then. the main trigger for this post: the game of poker now seems to have “folded” to computer supremacy. a new paper was published on Deepstack and its highly competitive play, and Libratus is $800K up in a recent match against top experts (top players). my understanding is that there is still some weakness in multiplayer games and that the new breakthru is for 1-1 games, human vs computer, but presumably that razor-thin human edge might also melt away quickly.[a]

poker was a very good game for humans wrt our inherent/ evolved psychology. we (top humans that is) seem to have an intuitive grasp of how to bet based on the strength of cards, including the use of bluffing. it took computers until the 21st century to master this stuff. but it looks like they just passed the threshhold again. in a small surprise, it wasnt done by Deepmind but which is behind many other near-monthly, even verging on weekly breakthroughs.[c]

maybe not by total coincidence, the winning Libratus algorithm involves training a neural network to accurately estimate the search tree, quite similar to the Deepmind Go strategy that made huge headlines just a year ago. the media hasnt picked up on the poker competition as much as it did with Go… is it because cautious/ publicity shy academics have less PR instinct than google? or less budget? but maybe that “relatively low profile” will change in the weeks/ months ahead. hopefully there will be a very high profile contest that again captures widespread public interest/ imagination.

it seems the top poker competitions are typically held in Las Vegas afaik… what would it take to get the computers in that? wouldnt be cool if say Vegas (or some other high profile gambling center) decided to publicize it to attract attn/ tourism? but would the computer algorithms be competitive in the top multiplayer games? there have been increasing/ huge audiences for poker over last few years, not sure what all the factors are in in this surge (internet gambling might play a role…)

its neat to see academia still at the top of competitive research in AI. but that seems to be thinning somewhat over last few years as the massive corporations Google[b], Microsoft, Apple,[g] Facebook, Intel [f] and misc other corps [e] are snapping up AI talent like its a feverish arms race, and to some degree it is. theres also very fast/ dynamic startup/ other merger activity going on, and new research laboratories being founded.[h]

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