3 ms·

This is sort of like asking: If you had Star Trek replicators, what would be the optimal configuration to use those replicators as paperweights? D&D is not a g

by xamuel 7y ago

This is sort of like asking: If you had Star Trek replicators, what would be the optimal configuration to use those replicators as paperweights? D&D is not a game with rigorously defined rules and winning conditions, instead it's a means to an end, the end being: have fun with friends through a mutual fantasy. If you had a genuine post-singularity superhuman AGI, it would be silly to use it for D&D, because you could just directly instruct it, "Make my friends and I have fun through a mutual fantasy". This might be inherently dangerous because a truly superhuman AGI would probably be so effective that you and your friends would end up unable to distinguish said mutual fantasy from reality and you'd all end up blissfully running around in the resulting fantasy for the rest of your lives.

DivisionSol 7y ago
"dangerous"? Edit: I personally know a good amount of people for that is a life goal.
- justincredible 7y ago
  Clearly, you haven't watched Mazes and Monsters.
- xamuel 7y ago
  Depends on your definition of dangerous. Dangerous in the same sense that a button you could press to directly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers would be dangerous, because you'd probably end up pressing it to the exclusion of everything else (personal hygiene, family, eating...)
  - chongli 7y ago
    This is called the wireheading problem [1]. It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible [2]. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-comp...
    - xamuel 7y ago
      >It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible Correction: it was downplayed by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated common sense in the hypothetical AGI. (Based on skimming the link you posted; I haven't read Stuart's book.)
      - chongli 7y ago
        You should read instead of skim. Stuart Russell specifically rejects the idea of “perfectly calibrated common sense” in AI. He says AI should not interpret any command literally, but instead take a Bayesian approach. This is much closer to how humans respond to one another’s demands.
        naniwaduni 7y ago
        Congratulations, you've reduced a hard problem to a harder problem!
  - c22 7y ago
    If you have a superhuman AGI willing to do what you ask of it, just make sure you ask it to take care of that other stuff too.
Retric 7y ago
> genuine post-singularity superhuman AGI Except we don’t have that. AI research is mostly about taking a problem that’s just a little to difficult to actually do and working on it. A great DM AI May not need to understand what’s going on any more than a jeopardy AI, it just needs to be good enough to work. A great many things like image classification initially look like they need AGI, but you can make something useful without it.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
Hang on a minute. We alread have AI DMs, without being anywhere near AGI. It's just -they are very limited as DMs and they're not even recognised for being DMs, we just think of them as whatever impossibly complicated logic that runs inside a C-RPG and is responsible for managing encounters, handing out rewards, and yes, even advancing the story (such as it is in most C-RPGs), largely through pre-scripted events, of course. Like I say, this kind of software, pretty common in C-RPGs, is very limited when compared to a human GM, in particular because it cannot present the player with genuinely novel situations and cannot respond to the player's actions with genuinely novel reactions. In other words, the kind of "AI" (ad-hoc game logic) that runs on C-RPGs, is extremely primitive and very unsatisfying, hence the reliance of most C-RPGs on action rather than _inter_action with the players. Since these kinds of ad-hoc "DMs" are so very limited, even a very small improvement in their ability to interact with the player(s) in surprising and imaginative manners would be a _huge_ improvement. In the same sense, the ability to reliably generate an interesting story _procedurally_ would be a _huge_ improvement on the current situation, where the majority of procedurally generated game content is just environments with enemies, rewards etc. There are very few games that go a little bit beyond that, e.g. Dwarf Fortress that generates an entire world's mythology and so on. So there's no need to go as far as AGI. We likely don't even have to go as far as machine learning. The kind of improvement that most gamers would really enjoy is probably within our technological capabilities right now- but there's very little in terms of efforts to make it happen. Why, I'm not sure.
- xamuel 7y ago
  If you're willing to stretch things that far, a chess playing robot could be considered a DM who administers an extremely hyperspecific campaign which is isomorphic to chess. Or, tic-tac-toe for that matter. A C-RPG captures D&D in the same sense that a WWII-themed video game captures the true World War II. In other words: not at all. A WWII-themed game applies WWII costumes, sound effects, etc. to an underlying game logic. Switching the WWII costumes to D&D costumes and marketing the result as D&D doesn't really make it D&D.

by xamuel 7y ago

DivisionSol 7y ago

"dangerous"? Edit: I personally know a good amount of people for that is a life goal.

justincredible 7y ago
Clearly, you haven't watched Mazes and Monsters.
xamuel 7y ago
Depends on your definition of dangerous. Dangerous in the same sense that a button you could press to directly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers would be dangerous, because you'd probably end up pressing it to the exclusion of everything else (personal hygiene, family, eating...)
- chongli 7y ago
  This is called the wireheading problem [1]. It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible [2]. [1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Wireheading [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-compatible/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/30/book-review-human-comp...
  - xamuel 7y ago
    >It was solved (for AI) by Stuart Russell in his new book Human Compatible Correction: it was downplayed by Stuart Russell. Stuart took simplistic strawman examples and made them look silly by assuming perfectly calibrated common sense in the hypothetical AGI. (Based on skimming the link you posted; I haven't read Stuart's book.)
    - chongli 7y ago
      You should read instead of skim. Stuart Russell specifically rejects the idea of “perfectly calibrated common sense” in AI. He says AI should not interpret any command literally, but instead take a Bayesian approach. This is much closer to how humans respond to one another’s demands.
      - naniwaduni 7y ago
        Congratulations, you've reduced a hard problem to a harder problem!
- c22 7y ago
  If you have a superhuman AGI willing to do what you ask of it, just make sure you ask it to take care of that other stuff too.

Retric 7y ago

> genuine post-singularity superhuman AGI Except we don’t have that. AI research is mostly about taking a problem that’s just a little to difficult to actually do and working on it. A great DM AI May not need to understand what’s going on any more than a jeopardy AI, it just needs to be good enough to work. A great many things like image classification initially look like they need AGI, but you can make something useful without it.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

Hang on a minute. We alread have AI DMs, without being anywhere near AGI. It's just -they are very limited as DMs and they're not even recognised for being DMs, we just think of them as whatever impossibly complicated logic that runs inside a C-RPG and is responsible for managing encounters, handing out rewards, and yes, even advancing the story (such as it is in most C-RPGs), largely through pre-scripted events, of course. Like I say, this kind of software, pretty common in C-RPGs, is very limited when compared to a human GM, in particular because it cannot present the player with genuinely novel situations and cannot respond to the player's actions with genuinely novel reactions. In other words, the kind of "AI" (ad-hoc game logic) that runs on C-RPGs, is extremely primitive and very unsatisfying, hence the reliance of most C-RPGs on action rather than _inter_action with the players. Since these kinds of ad-hoc "DMs" are so very limited, even a very small improvement in their ability to interact with the player(s) in surprising and imaginative manners would be a _huge_ improvement. In the same sense, the ability to reliably generate an interesting story _procedurally_ would be a _huge_ improvement on the current situation, where the majority of procedurally generated game content is just environments with enemies, rewards etc. There are very few games that go a little bit beyond that, e.g. Dwarf Fortress that generates an entire world's mythology and so on. So there's no need to go as far as AGI. We likely don't even have to go as far as machine learning. The kind of improvement that most gamers would really enjoy is probably within our technological capabilities right now- but there's very little in terms of efforts to make it happen. Why, I'm not sure.

xamuel 7y ago
If you're willing to stretch things that far, a chess playing robot could be considered a DM who administers an extremely hyperspecific campaign which is isomorphic to chess. Or, tic-tac-toe for that matter. A C-RPG captures D&D in the same sense that a WWII-themed video game captures the true World War II. In other words: not at all. A WWII-themed game applies WWII costumes, sound effects, etc. to an underlying game logic. Switching the WWII costumes to D&D costumes and marketing the result as D&D doesn't really make it D&D.