I think this approach tries to use puns to confuse AI… but it’ll get old quickly for humans. Once the card is answered, it can no longer be of much value next times.
Long try
Karma: 43
Thanks a bunch Maxim! I remember you in my hypothetical “drop all water on Earth” question—so, a usually late guy but always arrives with excellent answers :)
1 of the main differences between board & card games that I can discern is that 1 has perfect info, as you pointed out, the other not. Thus if we integrate imperfect info into a board game, can programmers just combine the 2 algorithms to solve it, or they will have to find another approach?
Unlike the Earth water question, I have some difficulties understanding the technical terms fully:
I don’t really know SC2 but played Civ4, so by ‘scouting’ did you mean fogbusting? And the cost is to spend a unit to do it? What does it have to do with Markov property? Is fogbusting even possible in a real life board game?
Lengthy gameplay, IMHO, is bad when our 2nd goal is to attract people. Especially in this age of distraction, where youngsters can’t concentrate for 20 minutes.
I learnt in a Crash course that computer science is essentially many layers of abstracting, so I’m a bit surprised when it turns out that AIs can’t see the obvious 101 pigeons in 100 holes. Can we conclude that what separate us humans from AIs is that ability of insight? Also, I’m curious as to how you’d apply this last element in a real game example.
BTW, what is RL? Real-life? :)
Video games has some advantages regarding AI over board games. While boards are restricted by real life physics & amount of materials (1 can’t have 9 pawns in chess!), software offers virtually endless options & things to add. The amount of variations & positions are also tremendous, thus brute force is inefficient. The examples you linked show that. Therefore, it is in board games that we have to apply our ingenious the most to fuck those AIs up.
Er… I’m not sure I follow. In the sentence, if the word “you” means “the individual me” then no, I don’t think the AI box ex is a game. It’s merely a thought experiment, and actually a pretty stupid one. If a box is designed to completely separate an AI from the real world then allowing it to interact with outside personnel destroys the purpose of the box in the 1st place. It’s about as much a game to me as Roko’s basilisk.
If the word “you” mean “people in general” then no, unsolved AI problems are complicated and boring to the population. Something must be fun for people to consider it a game. Just because a part of LWers are obsessed with AI doesn’t mean everyone is, too.
Tks Kaj. I can see that this designer tried to fuck AIs up by the brute force way, which is not efficient and, well, not elegant. The game also kind of suffers from the same problem as Esperanto, that is it’s way too “eurocentric”.
Those summaries from the site sound dubious.
On average there are over 17,000 possible moves compared to about 30 for chess; this significantly limits how deep computers can think, but does not seem to affect humans.
Of course that affects humans. This is like sacrificing most of your 2nd goal to get a tiny little bit ahead on your 1st goal.
End game databases are not helpful since a game can end with all pieces still on the board.
Absurd. Many strategy/abstract games, even chess, can end with all pieces alive.
Research papers on Arimaa suggest it is more of a strategic and positional game with less emphasis on tactics.
Reviews I read suggest otherwise. Moreover, the game claims that it’s among the highest rated on BGG. Following the link reveals that it’s down in the 40ish or 50ish ranks, below Go, Xiangqi, Shogi, and even Chess, which it aspires to improve from.
Besides, there’s a pattern I noticed from reading the reviews. Those high scores for Animaa usually come from earlier years, 2000s. Conversely, the recent ones are dominated by negative views. In them we can see those repeated complaints about slow pace, boring feel and stripping off of chess’ aesthetics...
So, I’d argue that Animaa isn’t really an attempt to do what I asked in the question. It went solely for the 1st goal while completely ignoring the 2nd goal, which weigh about 40-45% of importance IMO. After all, the human element is just something we’re having an edge over AIs. And what is a game if it doesn’t have people playing??
Thanks for letting me know about yet another of his projects. JG has an interesting style of presentation, I enjoyed many of his Crash course episodes. Glad that we now have 1 more similarity :)
That said, it seems like the things he reviews in his podcasts are a bit too wide and too spontaneous. My goal for the proposed system is that it get aggregated reviews on only stuffs that help us improve, thus the chosen words of theory, technique, method, model/modus… You know, things that many LWers are crazy about.
I guess you guys running the site like monochrome. While it’s ok enough to differentiate on the homepage, where blog titles are big and bold, I doubt using that scheme will be effective with hover.
Besides, that will requires readers to reach out and move their mouse over the link for 1 second, squint for a while to find whether it’s grey or black, and then move it out and wait another 1 second for the preview to go off; in contrast to just glance at the circle icon to find out. No-brainer IMO.
Has anyone suggested it yet? I think LW should have a system to notice users whether they’ve read a linked article or not when they’re reading inside another. That’s a basic & universal need, yet I’m surprised it’s not implemented. On other sites, it’s simply the link’s color: blue if unread, violet if read. If you guys decide to opt for a more sophisticated system, then I propose using 8 rainbow colors: black means the user hasn’t read it, red indicates once, orange twice… purple 7 times or more. In case you’re worried the various long link shades may distract people, then just apply them to that circle indication at the end of the link. You could make it bigger and bold for readers to distinguish the colors.
Yeah, I did have that experience too. But come to think of it, his explanation in the video sounds counter-intuitive for AC & DC. With the bulb connected to the mains via a wire (even though it’s the neutral line and that line is severed) like in the better part of the video, as long as the mains is AC the bulb will always at least dim...
TBH I’m a bit more confused :)
Holy cow, I’ve just read to the “poynty” part in his work. Now I have a vague sense of why Tesla wanted to put wireless electricity down into every household. And even Feynmann was afraid of explaining the truth because of its complexity/difficulty.
I still have not achieved a breakthrough. See, when we broadcast a wave, say radio, then it will propagate into space and will be lost forever. Now as per your words, an AC flow in a wire will radiate energy outward ⇒ this means a lot of energy is lost all the time. Since the wattage in a wire is a constant, we lose a big and constant amount of energy no matter what we do. That seems not to be the case in real life.
Furthermore, if we accept that electrical energy actually flows in the field around the line, then why do we even need outlets and sockets? Just put a device near the wire, like those cordless chargers. Besides, electric thieves can be easy since almost everyone can put a specialized stealing device near a public line.
Oh, I was too focused on the system function while forgetting that safety can primarily apply to human health too :)
I think using the water as an analogy to electricity is still somehow not adequate to the task. For example, to make it slosh back & forth would require a tremendous amount of energy, which seems not to be the case with electricity.
But still, I also think that if a device consumes electricity, no matter what way—say, using electromagnetic field, then it must reflect into the lifeline in the wire (electrons) in some way. Since the power source propagate energy using the jiggling of electrons then by using them up, the device must impede that movement. This slowing in jiggling will then propagate back and display as the slowing of the turbine...
… which is to say, actually we convert kinetic energy into whatever type of energy we use, that’s the essence of “electricity”?
BTW, thank you for your explanations on fans & stuffs! Though the bits with computers & fridges are gloss-over, but I guess I can have a vague understanding.
Woah, it’s a thought that never occurred to me: turbines slow down when we use electricity. Makes sense when 1 thinks hard about it. Did you work in a power plant or something?
There’s another relevant question. When turbines rotate, they must be doing it inside a set of huge magnets; or they must themselves rotate the magnets inside a huge coil. In either case, there’s a need for magnets. As per my understanding, they can’t be electric magnets because it will destroy the purpose of generating electricity in the 1st place. So they must be natural ones. Those will decay over time because their field energy is being used all day. Therefore… theoretically, if humans exist long enough then we will run out of magnets and thus no electricity? For now I have no idea what is the Earth’s capacity for magnetic materials.
My appreciation—that’s really helpful, especially point 2. I was a bit hesitating when I saw the amount of links in cousin_it’s link, but point 3 encourages me to do it, even slowly.
Point 4 is kinda hard from my POV. I admit I’m too lazy to dig all the sources to display in a post. But then, if a question is formatted like that, wouldn’t it be way too long? I thought titles should be concise & provoking.
Thank you. Using the water pipe analogy, 1 can see some obvious flaws with AC system. What if something needs power right at the moment the water is in the middle state between to & fro, i.e. standstill? How about installing a converter device at the beginning of each household? Surely it’d be better to provide continuous flow to devices, not to mention there’s no need to manufacture trillions of small relays or rectifiers that are needed inside devices.
If what devices do is get fast water and release slow water, then it can be understood that in reality, they use the kinetic energy of electrons. Or maybe some devices make use of the magnetic field too? Can somebody detail how exactly a fan gets a flow of electrons and ends up moving its rotor? And how does a computer use electricity? A fridge?
The wiki Currents war article ends with a brief mention of HVDC. China utilizes it in 2019, and they certainly are not stupid, so...
The HVDC article lists some pros & cons of it over AC. At a quick glance, there are more pros. And what of the biggest disadvantage? Converter stations cost. And what do they do? They convert that DC into AC, so it can be distributed into households and then switched back to DC inside the devices so they can use electricity! All of this clusterfuck nonsense can be avoided if they use all-out DC system in the 1st place!
I guess using a war more than 120 years ago to justify current (pun intended) situation is not very good.
Tks. You mentioned isolation is important for safety. Can you elaborate some specific examples? As per my imagination, unless the threat has been predicted then the AC transformers are useless against sudden issues. Say, an abrupt surge will still propagate via its magnetic field before we can do anything.
Oh come on, many says one can’t rely on wiki. On higher topics like quantum & maybe electricity, wiki uses high words that confuse the hell out of me. For example, it uses the term “drifting speed” to describe “electrons’ velocity in wires”—how can I know to find it to read in the 1st place?
OTOH, I posted another question here asking where I should ask a question. Some people suggest posting on as many sites as possible, which means LW included. Even the FAQ or some other “official” documents here encourages asking any and all kinds of questions.
If by downvoting you meant the community only accept high-level questions where one must do substantial research (how substantial is defined by those who read the questions) before even considering writing it, then I think you succeeded. I do feel bad seeing my question got downvoted to a rotund 0, and do feel discouraged from asking questions in the future.
Ooh, indeed I didn’t know, thanks! The actual snail speed does surprise me. I guess an important hole has been patched.
Hmm. Well, anything physical can be a challenge to AI, since we don’t have many real-life machines playing games physically. While technically the idea rings true, my question didn’t intend to explore much of this approach :)