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I am just an NPC until I get coffee. For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It's cheap tricks and obviously fake but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a

I am just an NPC until I get coffee. For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It's cheap tricks and obviously fake but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a new trick you want to try in real life. Marvin Minsky once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge." If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Combining many tricks together can create illusion of generality that is very convincing.

lonelappde 7y ago
The kludginess of brains is textbook neuroscience, from instincts to reflexes, to illusions and more. Indeed, Game AI puts the "Game" first -- as it should for Games, but to the detriment of anyone who cares more about AI and wants Games to be a fun place to study AI. If we split Game AI into "problem solving" (like pathfinding) and "opponent personality", then we can recover a lot of good AI that generalizes beyond games, without being misled by the parts that only useful for tricking people in a toy environment.
MereInterest 7y ago
> If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Wikipedia has an interesting list of cognitive biases [1]. Going through these, I tend to think of all of them as heuristic failures, where those shortcuts and incomplete solutions are pushed to edge cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- ben_w 7y ago
  I’d go further and conjecture that our cognitive biases are necessary, that the “theoretically perfect” models that these biases are compared against when being called biases are actually spherical cows in a vacuum. However, I’m not a neuroscientist, and my knowledge and use of A.I. is limited to hobby projects.
  - MiracleUser 7y ago
    Necessary to what end? It could be necessary to maximize survival for the species, but that doesnt make it necessary to maximize survival for an individual. It's perfectly possible our heuristics are muddied beyond necessity in order to generate variety in action, so as to reduce risk to the unknown for the species - even though it would cause a minority of individuals to consistently make sub-optimal choices. From a speculative standpoint, it's easy to find examples of people doing things that we consider 'stupid' but it pays off because of some unlikely event occurring in coincidence. Reality has a lot of unknowns. There is no perfect model that could account for that. It's possible being hyper-intelligent (beyond our current ability) is (or was) a disadvantage for the species
    - orestarod 7y ago
      Take depression and nihilism for example. Great intelligence can overcome the very drives that makes us want to keep living - which is an arbitrary cause, and an extremely tedious activity.
nwienert 7y ago
I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks at all. Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks” were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked. I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just don’t really know well yet.
- robotresearcher 7y ago
  > I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.
  - nwienert 7y ago
    Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things - it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked. Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      >I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people each with their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.
echelon 7y ago
> Marvin Minsky Can we still cite Marvin Minsky in the AI field given the allegations that have arisen regarding his relationship with Epstein and sex trafficking? We should find better luminaries. I'm all for redemption and I hope Stallman comes around and apologizes, but Minsky went to the grave with whatever happened.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 7y ago
  Instead of downvoting me without a stated reason, can you provide a refutation? I'm open to changing my mind, but this is where it stands right now. I think we need to choose those we hold in esteem.
Reedx 7y ago
> evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers Yeah, that's the thing - the brain and body evolved for a much different environment than the one we find ourselves in today. So some aspects which used to be advantages are now disadvantages that we have to actively manage with things like exercise, healthy diet, meditation. Which the brain fights against.

lonelappde 7y ago

The kludginess of brains is textbook neuroscience, from instincts to reflexes, to illusions and more. Indeed, Game AI puts the "Game" first -- as it should for Games, but to the detriment of anyone who cares more about AI and wants Games to be a fun place to study AI. If we split Game AI into "problem solving" (like pathfinding) and "opponent personality", then we can recover a lot of good AI that generalizes beyond games, without being misled by the parts that only useful for tricking people in a toy environment.

MereInterest 7y ago

> If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Wikipedia has an interesting list of cognitive biases [1]. Going through these, I tend to think of all of them as heuristic failures, where those shortcuts and incomplete solutions are pushed to edge cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

ben_w 7y ago
I’d go further and conjecture that our cognitive biases are necessary, that the “theoretically perfect” models that these biases are compared against when being called biases are actually spherical cows in a vacuum. However, I’m not a neuroscientist, and my knowledge and use of A.I. is limited to hobby projects.
- MiracleUser 7y ago
  Necessary to what end? It could be necessary to maximize survival for the species, but that doesnt make it necessary to maximize survival for an individual. It's perfectly possible our heuristics are muddied beyond necessity in order to generate variety in action, so as to reduce risk to the unknown for the species - even though it would cause a minority of individuals to consistently make sub-optimal choices. From a speculative standpoint, it's easy to find examples of people doing things that we consider 'stupid' but it pays off because of some unlikely event occurring in coincidence. Reality has a lot of unknowns. There is no perfect model that could account for that. It's possible being hyper-intelligent (beyond our current ability) is (or was) a disadvantage for the species
  - orestarod 7y ago
    Take depression and nihilism for example. Great intelligence can overcome the very drives that makes us want to keep living - which is an arbitrary cause, and an extremely tedious activity.

nwienert 7y ago

I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks at all. Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks” were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked. I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just don’t really know well yet.

robotresearcher 7y ago
> I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.
- nwienert 7y ago
  Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things - it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked. Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    >I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people each with their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.

echelon 7y ago

> Marvin Minsky Can we still cite Marvin Minsky in the AI field given the allegations that have arisen regarding his relationship with Epstein and sex trafficking? We should find better luminaries. I'm all for redemption and I hope Stallman comes around and apologizes, but Minsky went to the grave with whatever happened.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
echelon 7y ago
Instead of downvoting me without a stated reason, can you provide a refutation? I'm open to changing my mind, but this is where it stands right now. I think we need to choose those we hold in esteem.

Reedx 7y ago

> evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers Yeah, that's the thing - the brain and body evolved for a much different environment than the one we find ourselves in today. So some aspects which used to be advantages are now disadvantages that we have to actively manage with things like exercise, healthy diet, meditation. Which the brain fights against.