6 ms·

I recall an AI playing a game that, just before losing, would press the "menu" button to pause the game and then stop doing anything. It fulfilled it's goal (no

I recall an AI playing a game that, just before losing, would press the "menu" button to pause the game and then stop doing anything. It fulfilled it's goal (not lose). That behavior should set expectations when it comes to AI. Also, am-I the only one that thinks this whole "chat bot having a natural conversation to book an appointment" is useless when a simple date-picker would do?

hprotagonist 6y ago
http://tom7.org/mario/ http://tom7.org/mario/ to be fair, learnfun was made for SIGBOVIK.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  I didn't know it was made for a joke conference! But it does illustrates how it's easy to get trapped into a local minima.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    They're doing what you tell them to, not what you want them to. Same with GPT-3; it's predicting what (from its experience) it thinks a human would say, not what is ethical to say.
    - rmrfrmrf 6y ago
      unless...
tyingq 6y ago
"when a simple date-picker would do?" I guess it would depend on the context. Some people might find it handy in an Alexa type device. But yeah it makes no sense on a phone or PC.
mlyle 6y ago
In fairness, this was my strategy at age 6, too. :P
tzs 6y ago
Another fun one is when the programmers accidentally give the AI the wrong goal. I have no idea if this actually happened, but I've heard of a chess program that was playing in a tournament that started making really weird moves in the endgame. Before that point, it was playing excellently. It took the developers a while to figure out what was going on. They had made a mistake when doing some last minute tweaks before the tournament, and in effect the program was playing to lose. Think about that for a minute. At first you might think losing would be easy. Just don't defend against your opponent's attacks, and make moves that weaken your position to make it even easier for the opponent. But wait...the mistake in the code applied to the program's evaluation of both its own moves and the opponent's possible moves. In other words the program assumed that the opponent was also playing to lose. How do you play to lose a game of chess if your opponent also wants to lose? You need to get to a position where the only legal move of the opponent is to checkmate you. You'll want a position where you have a big material advantage, and all the opponent has is their king and enough material to mate you. Probably just king and queen. Then you'd need to keep putting them in check, in such a way that they have to block with the queen. You'd need to arrange a series of such checks and blocks so that the final block also delivers checkmate on you. And so it turns out that during the opening and middle game, playing to lose against someone who is also playing to lose looks pretty much the same as playing to win against someone who is also playing to win. (Personally, I doubt this actually happened. The story is old, and I don't think chess programs would have been able to see far enough ahead for them to discover that getting an overwhelming position is the way to force the opponent to checkmate them).
- blahedo 6y ago
  > (Personally, I doubt this actually happened. The story is old, and I don't think chess programs would have been able to see far enough ahead for them to discover that getting an overwhelming position is the way to force the opponent to checkmate them). True, but (in the traditional minimax-alpha-beta-classic-gameplay model) you're using heuristics anyway up until you're in spitting distance of the end, and it seems plausible that if this "tweak" involved something like negating something and flipping a less-than sign (or whatever) that the heuristics were evaluating correctly but the end game evaluations were backwards. (Which contradicts the explanation but not the overall story.) It's also possible that the explanation does work even with a backwards heuristic: in the try-to-win version, I'll eliminate or downgrade one branch because my only success route would be if the opponent directly manouvres themselves to be captured, which they obviously wouldn't do; but in the try-to-lose version, I might eliminate the same branch because I expect the opponent would do that but I don't want that to happen. I can't quite fully work out the logic in my head but it seems plausible.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SatvikBeri 6y ago
Two minute papers has many fun examples of AIs with unexpected behavior, OpenAI's hide and seek is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M
40four 6y ago
That sounds like the AI equivalent of 'flipping the table'!
Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
I had a client trying to build this. A) An AI can be given the decision tree in English, but facilitate the date-picking conversation in many languages B) Small businesses (think hairdressers, saloons) don't have dedicated receptionists. So the AI's job is to filter requests and put them into buckets so that employees can process them more efficiently. C) Small businesses need something that works with WhatsApp. Date pickers are hard to integrate with that.
- colanderman 6y ago
  Regarding B -- why can't the user just pick the category from a menu? Personally, I despise being asked to categorize my ask in English to an AI, as I have no way of knowing how much detail I need to provide to get my request into the right "bucket", or whether I've succeeded in doing so. With a menu I can do that in 3 seconds and one click, with immediate feedback. Regarding C -- why does the date selection need to occur in WhatsApp? If a user has WhatsApp, they have a web browser. If a 3rd party has servers running WhatsApp bots, they can host a web server. Why not, from WhatsApp, link the user to a website to select a date?
  - iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
    I think B is just a symptom of the complete failure of (many) business people to understand what ML is or what it is good at. It starts with people equating "AI" with something they've seen in a movie and working backwards, and like you say, ends with just a really bad way of interacting with a menu system. This is going to persist until either we invent AGI or AI stops being a buzzword used by business people who have no idea what the technology actually does to make up use cases.
  - Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
    Both B) and C) is because these small businesses, most of them have no website. The barrier to entry for businesses to go online from a resource perspective (time, training, cost etc.) is much, much lower to just have a Whatsapp business account. Whatsapp is just an amazing bang-for-your-buck proposition, but we are limited to the constraint of that ecosystem.
andai 6y ago
> chat bot having a natural conversation to book an appointment Sounds like a social anxiety simulator to me.
colanderman 6y ago
> am-I the only one that thinks this whole "chat bot having a natural conversation to book an appointment" is useless when a simple date-picker would do? Nope. I find being forced to converse in English with a machine to be absolutely infuriating. I know what I want and how to tell it to a machine. Being forced to add noise words to allow my request to pass through a useless extra layer is a disrespectful waste of my time and mental energy. I will happily use an automated menu-driven system. But as soon as it forces me to "converse" with it, I do whatever I can to force it to connect me to an actual human.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  You probably don't like speaking to robots because they're currently terrible. Fixing that obviously has far more of an upside than just not trying.
  - colanderman 6y ago
    Maybe, but can I please not be forced to do business via the robots while they are terrible? Also, beside being spectacularly good, the AI has to also be actually empowered for me not to find the process wasteful and insulting. The AI should actually be able to solve my problem as a result of natural language communication. Not just walk me through a prepared script: that's frustrating even when a real live human does it.
  - craftinator 6y ago
    Except that I, too, would rather book an appointment with a date picker than talk to anyone, much less a machine programmed to act like a person. It's like in order to make coffee, getting in my car and driving around the block ten times, parking in front of my house and going in to make coffee, vs just MAKING COFFEE, without doing a bunch of time wasting fluff first.
    - exporectomy 6y ago
      This might be an age thing because I was like that when I was younger. I didn't understand why I had to keep interacting with seemingly pointless humans in service industries everywhere. But now I'm older, I find talking is more comfortable than using a computer. I don't quite know why. Maybe speaking to a human is something we're biologically built for and these other modes of interaction are a little extra taxing on the brain even if they appear simpler. They involve reading and writing which every school kid knows is harder work than talking. Or maybe it's just that so many computer interactions are actually slow and frustrating. Ever tried ordering at McDonalds using the touch-screen machines? It's aggravatingly tedious and complicated. There's no "take my money and go away" button. You have to navigate your way through a bunch of stupid menus trying to up-sell you, and each one has an unforgivable loading time.
fartcannon 6y ago
There was an AI created the absolutely brilliant Tom7 on on his YouTube channel 'SuckerPinch' on April 1, 2013 that paused a game of Tetris instead of losing. In my opinion, Tom doesn't get enough credit for his work. He released his AI a full 8+ months before DeepMind released their Atari playing AI. Watch the whole thing, it's delightful. The AI pauses Tetris right before it loses at around 16mins into the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY I also recommend his other videos. Brilliant guy. Edit: Here's the paper http://tom7.org/mario/mario.pdf http://tom7.org/mario/mario.pdf
- etrain 6y ago
  Tom7’s sigbovik submissions are true works of art. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    My personal favorite is the compiler that uses only the printable bytes.
jazzyjackson 6y ago
My first role as a software developer was writing an elaborate chatbot that worked as a document retrieval and recommendation system that would conversationally collect the prerequisites to running SQL scripts. Many months in we added shortcuts to the system that essentially turned it into drop down menus for users who didn't want to talk to a chatty personality to get work done. I loved ChatScript and filling templates with data retrieved through fact-triples tho, hope I get to work with it again someday.
Lorin 6y ago
Reminds me of an old (~8yr?) article about applying machine learning to hardware - and one of the tests was producing a chipset that could produce a certain output tone. ... it worked, but only in a specific area of the lab. When they looked at the layout, they discovered the ML system designed a circuit that picked up relevant nearby EM/radio noise as the source, so when the chip was moved - it broke. It produced a radio! :) Wish I could remember the article since it also mentioned unusual circuit designs that weren't directly connected to each other, but used some IC 'gotchas' in advantageous ways (albeit inconsistently) to reach the goal.
- Isomatik 6y ago
  This looks like the original paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_Circuit_Intrinsic_in_Silicon_Entwined_With_Physics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_...
UncleMeat 6y ago
It is very important to know two things about that work. 1. It was for Sigbovik, which is a joke conference. The work was a fun side project by one dude. 2. Tom Murphy isn't an AI researcher, it wasn't intended to demonstrate the state of the art of the field, and it wasn't using modern techniques like neural networks. It was a great story and I love Tom's work, but it shouldn't be used as a meaningful example of the limitations or worries regarding AI.

hprotagonist 6y ago

http://tom7.org/mario/ http://tom7.org/mario/ to be fair, learnfun was made for SIGBOVIK.

908B64B197 6y ago
I didn't know it was made for a joke conference! But it does illustrates how it's easy to get trapped into a local minima.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  They're doing what you tell them to, not what you want them to. Same with GPT-3; it's predicting what (from its experience) it thinks a human would say, not what is ethical to say.
  - rmrfrmrf 6y ago
    unless...

tyingq 6y ago

"when a simple date-picker would do?" I guess it would depend on the context. Some people might find it handy in an Alexa type device. But yeah it makes no sense on a phone or PC.

mlyle 6y ago

In fairness, this was my strategy at age 6, too. :P

tzs 6y ago

Another fun one is when the programmers accidentally give the AI the wrong goal. I have no idea if this actually happened, but I've heard of a chess program that was playing in a tournament that started making really weird moves in the endgame. Before that point, it was playing excellently. It took the developers a while to figure out what was going on. They had made a mistake when doing some last minute tweaks before the tournament, and in effect the program was playing to lose. Think about that for a minute. At first you might think losing would be easy. Just don't defend against your opponent's attacks, and make moves that weaken your position to make it even easier for the opponent. But wait...the mistake in the code applied to the program's evaluation of both its own moves and the opponent's possible moves. In other words the program assumed that the opponent was also playing to lose. How do you play to lose a game of chess if your opponent also wants to lose? You need to get to a position where the only legal move of the opponent is to checkmate you. You'll want a position where you have a big material advantage, and all the opponent has is their king and enough material to mate you. Probably just king and queen. Then you'd need to keep putting them in check, in such a way that they have to block with the queen. You'd need to arrange a series of such checks and blocks so that the final block also delivers checkmate on you. And so it turns out that during the opening and middle game, playing to lose against someone who is also playing to lose looks pretty much the same as playing to win against someone who is also playing to win. (Personally, I doubt this actually happened. The story is old, and I don't think chess programs would have been able to see far enough ahead for them to discover that getting an overwhelming position is the way to force the opponent to checkmate them).

blahedo 6y ago
> (Personally, I doubt this actually happened. The story is old, and I don't think chess programs would have been able to see far enough ahead for them to discover that getting an overwhelming position is the way to force the opponent to checkmate them). True, but (in the traditional minimax-alpha-beta-classic-gameplay model) you're using heuristics anyway up until you're in spitting distance of the end, and it seems plausible that if this "tweak" involved something like negating something and flipping a less-than sign (or whatever) that the heuristics were evaluating correctly but the end game evaluations were backwards. (Which contradicts the explanation but not the overall story.) It's also possible that the explanation does work even with a backwards heuristic: in the try-to-win version, I'll eliminate or downgrade one branch because my only success route would be if the opponent directly manouvres themselves to be captured, which they obviously wouldn't do; but in the try-to-lose version, I might eliminate the same branch because I expect the opponent would do that but I don't want that to happen. I can't quite fully work out the logic in my head but it seems plausible.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SatvikBeri 6y ago

Two minute papers has many fun examples of AIs with unexpected behavior, OpenAI's hide and seek is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu56xVlZ40M

40four 6y ago

That sounds like the AI equivalent of 'flipping the table'!

Mengkudulangsat 6y ago

I had a client trying to build this. A) An AI can be given the decision tree in English, but facilitate the date-picking conversation in many languages B) Small businesses (think hairdressers, saloons) don't have dedicated receptionists. So the AI's job is to filter requests and put them into buckets so that employees can process them more efficiently. C) Small businesses need something that works with WhatsApp. Date pickers are hard to integrate with that.

colanderman 6y ago
Regarding B -- why can't the user just pick the category from a menu? Personally, I despise being asked to categorize my ask in English to an AI, as I have no way of knowing how much detail I need to provide to get my request into the right "bucket", or whether I've succeeded in doing so. With a menu I can do that in 3 seconds and one click, with immediate feedback. Regarding C -- why does the date selection need to occur in WhatsApp? If a user has WhatsApp, they have a web browser. If a 3rd party has servers running WhatsApp bots, they can host a web server. Why not, from WhatsApp, link the user to a website to select a date?
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  I think B is just a symptom of the complete failure of (many) business people to understand what ML is or what it is good at. It starts with people equating "AI" with something they've seen in a movie and working backwards, and like you say, ends with just a really bad way of interacting with a menu system. This is going to persist until either we invent AGI or AI stops being a buzzword used by business people who have no idea what the technology actually does to make up use cases.
- Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
  Both B) and C) is because these small businesses, most of them have no website. The barrier to entry for businesses to go online from a resource perspective (time, training, cost etc.) is much, much lower to just have a Whatsapp business account. Whatsapp is just an amazing bang-for-your-buck proposition, but we are limited to the constraint of that ecosystem.

andai 6y ago

> chat bot having a natural conversation to book an appointment Sounds like a social anxiety simulator to me.

colanderman 6y ago

> am-I the only one that thinks this whole "chat bot having a natural conversation to book an appointment" is useless when a simple date-picker would do? Nope. I find being forced to converse in English with a machine to be absolutely infuriating. I know what I want and how to tell it to a machine. Being forced to add noise words to allow my request to pass through a useless extra layer is a disrespectful waste of my time and mental energy. I will happily use an automated menu-driven system. But as soon as it forces me to "converse" with it, I do whatever I can to force it to connect me to an actual human.

exporectomy 6y ago
You probably don't like speaking to robots because they're currently terrible. Fixing that obviously has far more of an upside than just not trying.
- colanderman 6y ago
  Maybe, but can I please not be forced to do business via the robots while they are terrible? Also, beside being spectacularly good, the AI has to also be actually empowered for me not to find the process wasteful and insulting. The AI should actually be able to solve my problem as a result of natural language communication. Not just walk me through a prepared script: that's frustrating even when a real live human does it.
- craftinator 6y ago
  Except that I, too, would rather book an appointment with a date picker than talk to anyone, much less a machine programmed to act like a person. It's like in order to make coffee, getting in my car and driving around the block ten times, parking in front of my house and going in to make coffee, vs just MAKING COFFEE, without doing a bunch of time wasting fluff first.
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    This might be an age thing because I was like that when I was younger. I didn't understand why I had to keep interacting with seemingly pointless humans in service industries everywhere. But now I'm older, I find talking is more comfortable than using a computer. I don't quite know why. Maybe speaking to a human is something we're biologically built for and these other modes of interaction are a little extra taxing on the brain even if they appear simpler. They involve reading and writing which every school kid knows is harder work than talking. Or maybe it's just that so many computer interactions are actually slow and frustrating. Ever tried ordering at McDonalds using the touch-screen machines? It's aggravatingly tedious and complicated. There's no "take my money and go away" button. You have to navigate your way through a bunch of stupid menus trying to up-sell you, and each one has an unforgivable loading time.

fartcannon 6y ago

There was an AI created the absolutely brilliant Tom7 on on his YouTube channel 'SuckerPinch' on April 1, 2013 that paused a game of Tetris instead of losing. In my opinion, Tom doesn't get enough credit for his work. He released his AI a full 8+ months before DeepMind released their Atari playing AI. Watch the whole thing, it's delightful. The AI pauses Tetris right before it loses at around 16mins into the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY I also recommend his other videos. Brilliant guy. Edit: Here's the paper http://tom7.org/mario/mario.pdf http://tom7.org/mario/mario.pdf

etrain 6y ago
Tom7’s sigbovik submissions are true works of art. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  My personal favorite is the compiler that uses only the printable bytes.

jazzyjackson 6y ago

My first role as a software developer was writing an elaborate chatbot that worked as a document retrieval and recommendation system that would conversationally collect the prerequisites to running SQL scripts. Many months in we added shortcuts to the system that essentially turned it into drop down menus for users who didn't want to talk to a chatty personality to get work done. I loved ChatScript and filling templates with data retrieved through fact-triples tho, hope I get to work with it again someday.

Lorin 6y ago

Reminds me of an old (~8yr?) article about applying machine learning to hardware - and one of the tests was producing a chipset that could produce a certain output tone. ... it worked, but only in a specific area of the lab. When they looked at the layout, they discovered the ML system designed a circuit that picked up relevant nearby EM/radio noise as the source, so when the chip was moved - it broke. It produced a radio! :) Wish I could remember the article since it also mentioned unusual circuit designs that weren't directly connected to each other, but used some IC 'gotchas' in advantageous ways (albeit inconsistently) to reach the goal.

Isomatik 6y ago
This looks like the original paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_Circuit_Intrinsic_in_Silicon_Entwined_With_Physics https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_...

UncleMeat 6y ago

It is very important to know two things about that work. 1. It was for Sigbovik, which is a joke conference. The work was a fun side project by one dude. 2. Tom Murphy isn't an AI researcher, it wasn't intended to demonstrate the state of the art of the field, and it wasn't using modern techniques like neural networks. It was a great story and I love Tom's work, but it shouldn't be used as a meaningful example of the limitations or worries regarding AI.