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Player of Games
- sfkgtbor 5y agoI really like seeing references to the Culture series when naming things: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
- hoseja 5y agoKinda ironic since in the novel, a human player is better than the strong AI (albeit a little inexplicably).
- 7thaccount 5y agoI thought the protagonist wasn't nearly as talented as the culture AIs (even the ones that are not all that powerful)?
- hoseja 5y agoI don't think a full Culture Mind is present but he outstrips his spacecraft's ability to help him with preparation in later stages of the competition. I clearly remember this.
- macmac 5y agoAt least that is what the ship (SC) wants him to think.
- WJW 5y agoIndeed. (spoiler following) The plot basically revolves around SC manipulating both Gurgeh and the Empire of Azad in an ever bigger and complex game than the one in the book. Given how Banks describes the Minds in other books it would be extremely curious if they wouldn't crush any biological player in any normal game the same way chess computers crush humans these days. But, it is possible that a more limited mind like the security drone could be outstripped by Gurgeh. In one of the other books they do mention that "smaller" machines like environmental suits and small drones get more limited minds than full starships as it would be cruel to put a fully capable Mind in such a limited body.
- stavros 5y agoHow did I miss this plot point? It's been a while, but I remember focusing on the game Gurgeh played. Maybe I just don't remember it now.
- WJW 5y agoThe last page of the book gives it away: (MASSIVE SPOILER OBV) The security drone who came with Gurgeh to Azad was the same drone he meets during the introduction chapters who was "rejected" from SC and offers to let him cheat (though it was wearing a disguise at the time). Then, after he cheats he basically gets blackmailed into going to Azad and conveniently this "non-SC" drone comes with him in a very "non-SC" ship that claims to have its weapons removed but doesn't. At some crucial points the security drone influences Gurgeh to play the best he can, such as when he takes him on a tour of the slums and the Culture-educated Gurgeh gets so furious at the mistreatment he witnesses that he absolutely crushes his opponent in the next match. They mention in one of the final chapters that the minds wanted the Azad empire to become a better place since it was really shitty to its citizens. However, they couldn't just invade and impose laws because they're the Culture, and the Azad empire kept claiming moral superiority because they had this one thing (the Game) that they thought the Culture couldn't match. The Minds knew Gurgeh was talented enough to get far enough in the tournament that the Azad Empire would be seriously shaken, because if this single foreigner can beat so many of the best and brightest in the Empire at the thing it claims to do best then what could the entire Culture do? This turns out to have been correct, at the end of the book the Azad empire starts to collapse because they no longer trust their leadership, who have been proven to be incompetent at the very thing they claim to do best. Beaten by a human btw, not even by one of the god-machines that the Culture also has. Having predicted that this would happen, the Minds set out to manipulate Gurgeh into going to Azad to play the Game and by doing so bring about regime change. The Minds and/or SC were playing a much higher level game than Gurgeh all along, he was merely one of the pieces they used to play.
- stavros 5y agoAhh, thank you! Now that you recount it, it all comes back to me. I should read more Banks, he's a fantastic writer.
- thom 5y agoIs that clear from the text? Gurgeh supposedly perceives the result of the last game before the AIs so we’re led to believe he’s seeing deeper. Obviously he could have been wrong and still won. The AIs lied to and manipulated him the entire time so it’s hard to know, but it would seem a very odd weakness for an AI to have. I think Banks pretty quickly recanted on the subject of the Culture’s ‘referrers’ but I don’t think he plays a full Mind, so it’s not a clear cut conversation.
- joshuamorton 5y agoMy recollection is that by the end of the novel its clear that Gurgeh was never competitive with the ship, although he might have been competitive with his security drone (although even that isn't clear, since <spoilers> imply that the security drone is a better game player than it pretends to be). To me it felt like the whole point of the novel was that Gurgeh was a piece in an even larger game and he didn't even realize it. So the idea that the people playing the "bigger" game couldn't compete in the smaller game seems silly, and I think they mention that they used Gurgeh instead of an AI to make it appear fair to the inhabitants of the planet.
- sdenton4 5y agoYeah, I thought it was clear from the beginning of the book that no humans were even remotely competitive with any AI (including the main character) but that human game players were sort of an aesthetic throwback, like dog-racing in an era of F1 cars.
- 7thaccount 5y agoThis was my understanding as well, but I might have read into it. The culture minds are in freaking hyperspace to get around lightspeed limitations on computations. He for sure can't beat that, but he could beat someone on another planet at their own game that he literally just learned in the year it took to get there. A game that permeates every aspect of their civilization. I do assume his drone could beat him as well, but I'm not sure.
- pharmakom 5y agoNo he is not, but AIs are not allowed in the competition the story centers around.
- hoseja 5y agoNear the end of the competition, as he is deep in his analysis, the light craft AI gives up on helping him since it gets overwhelmed. Granted it's not a full Culture Mind (kinda hazy, been a while) but still a point for the meatbag.
- pharmakom 5y agoI think the main character can be so strong at the game by the end because of his immersion in Empire culture. The ships AI would likely be at least as strong with the same experiences. Plus, as you mention, the ships AI is not smartest AI around.
- arlort 5y agoI always interpreted the end reveal as showing that control was highly confident of both the outcome of the game and of how Gurgeh got to that outcome. It's been a while but I am pretty sure that the ship lied when saying that it got overwhelmed and did so only because it was confident he was on the right path but needed to get there in a specific way which wouldn't have worked quite the same if the ship intervened
- hesperiidae 5y agoYeah, he wouldn't have reached such a good solution with help, and that was also originally taken into account by the Culture when they sent him out in the first place, since they knew him that thoroughly.
- bduerst 5y agoYep, basically the nebulous, unknown minds of Control predicted the main character would win, and set up as many conditions as possible to push him to do so. Including bluffing about help from the AI. It was part of an even bigger game but I'm not going to get into spoilers.
- Borrible 5y agoBanks should have named one of Culture's General System Vehicles 'Don't be Evil'. https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
- dane-pgp 5y agoI think it is also a reference to "PogChamp", although it's disappointing that PoG apparently wasn't evaluated against the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) corpus of Atari 2600 games.
- abledon 5y agomuch more refined to think a spam of "POG!" stands for Player of Games when reading twitch chat
- doctor_eval 5y agoI suppose it's better than "Use of Weapons".
- OneTimePetes 5y agoWhy not have a seat, take that chair over there.
- _0ffh 5y agoOne of the best, and executed to perfection! You can sort-of-see the point coming for a long, long time in the book, as he gradually builds the suspicion by dropping the occasional hint here and there, but it's always so that it must remain a highly uncertain speculation until he drops the reveal. Just the right balance between "How should I have suspected that?" and "Those hints were too much on the nose!".
- OneTimePetes 5y agoIts such a crime - of war and all else, its like a blindspot of imagination. That a man would do such a thing - to what is essentially family, as tactics.. the horror..
- CobrastanJorji 5y agoAllusions are fun and all, but I disagree. These are important problems that a lot of people have put their whole careers into researching. Silly names like these lack gravitas.
- gremloni 5y agoIf anything the caliber and lore of the series gives the project an incredible amount of gravitas. Plus the scheme is just plain beautiful in my opinion.
- lacker 5y agoYou may find this Iain Banks interview enjoyable. TLDR search for "gravitas" ;-) https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/11/iainbanks-science-fiction https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/11/iainbanks-scie...
- sjg1729 5y agoAlways sad to see these projects suffer from A Shortfall of Gravitas
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- sdenton4 5y agoThis is clearly part of DeepMind's long-game plan to achieve world domination through board game mastery. Naming the new algorithm after the book is a real tip of their hand... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
- 7thaccount 5y agoPretty amazing book. I wish I could play a board game like that as well.
- stavros 5y agoI second this, it was excellent. I've only read a few Banks books, but this was my favorite.
- arvinsim 5y agoI started with Consider Phlebas but stopped because it seems too slow for me. Does it get better in the later chapters?
- vermilingua 5y agoIt does, but IMO it's probably worth reading The Player of Games or Use of Weapons before it anyway. With the exception of perhaps Surface Detail, none of the Culture books rely on any others. Consider Phlebas gives a good view of The Culture from "outside" (the perspective of the Idrians) but is quite slow.
- DylanSp 5y agoI mean, Player of Games has a pretty slow start too. I love that book, but the initial pacing is IMO its biggest flaw. I know Use of Weapons doesn't depend on any of the other books for its plot, but is it a decent intro to the setting? If it is, that's where I'd recommend starting.
- bkartal 5y agoImpressive work! Most authors, if not all, are from DeepMind Edmonton office.
- captn3m0 5y agoIf you are interested in this, I maintain a list of boardgame-solving related research at https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research https://github.com/captn3m0/boardgame-research, with sections for specific games. This looks really interesting. It would be a good project to test this against a general card-playing framework to easily test it on a variety of imperfect-information games based on playing cards.
- alper111 5y agoThis looks very good, thanks.
- fho 5y agoI tried my hand once or twice at (re-)implementing board games [0], so that I could run some common "AI" algorithms on the game trees. What tripped me up every time is that most board games have a lot of "if this happens, there is this specific rule that applies". Even relatively simple games (like Homeworlds) are pretty hard to nail down perfectly due to all the special cases. Do you, or somebody else, have any recommendations on how to handle this? [0] Dominion, Homeworlds and the battle part of Eclipse iirc.
- nicolodavis 5y agoYou could consider using a library like boardgame.io for this.
- fho 5y agoI'll look into that.
- captn3m0 5y ago+1 to boardgame.io. It provides very good abstractions for turns, phases, players, and partial information. I’ve implemented small games with a few hours of effort, and that includes a UI.
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- wly_cdgr 5y agoThe future is so depressing
- wetpaws 5y agoFun fact: The consensus between professional go and chess players is that all new AI systems (alphago, etc) have really revitalised the game and introduced incredible amount of new strategies and depth.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoYeah, whatever. As someone who grew up playing chess and is almost certainly much better at it than you, this future sucks
- _tkii 5y agoWhy?
- zem 5y agoclimate change, no doubt.
- Kaibeezy 5y agoBecause the only game left will be thrones?
- JanneVee 5y agoI don't know how go changed. But as for chess the tournament play at the master level have insane deep opening preparation done before with computers. They play preparation game where they try to guess what lines the opponent checked and memorized before the games. They aren't actually playing until their computer backed preparation ends more than the few moves that they have fed in to come up with something different. Both spectators and players kind of find this a little bit boring. I do acknowledge that this isn't a new phenomena Fischer complained about this before the computer engine era and came up with a chess variant to nullify deep opening prep!
- RivieraKid 5y agoWow, it can beat a good poker bot, that is impressive.
- fxtentacle 5y agoThis is a great result, but you can see that it's more of a theoretical case because of this: "converging to perfect play as available computation time and approximation capacity increases." That is true for pretty much all current deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The practical question is: How much computation do you need to get useful results? Alpha Go Zero is impressive mathematics, but who is willing to spend $1mio daily for months to train it? IMPALA (another Google one) can learn almost all Atari games, but you need a head node with 256 TPU cores and 1000+ evaluation workers to replicate the timings from the paper.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoYou often don't need anywhere near the amount of compute in these papers to get similar performance. Suppose you're a business that needs to play games. Most people seem to think that it's a matter of plugging in the settings from the paper, buying the same hardware, then clicking a button and waiting. It's not. The specific settings matter a lot. But my main point is that you'll get most of your performance pretty rapidly. The only reason to leave it running for so long is to get that last N%, which is nice for benchmarks but not for business. DeepMind overspends. Actually, they don't; they're not paying anywhere close to the price of a 256 core TPU. (Many external companies aren't, either, and you can get a good deal by negotiating with the Cloud TPU team.) But you don't need a 256 core TPU. Lots of times, these algorithms simply do not require the amount of compute that people throw at the problem. On the other hand, you can also usually get access to that kind of compute. A 256 core TPU isn't beyond reach. I'm pretty sure I could create one right now. It's free, thanks to TFRC, and you yourself can apply (and be approved). I was. https://sites.research.google/trc/ https://sites.research.google/trc/ It kills me that it's so hard to replicate these papers, which is most of the motivation for my comment here. Ultimately, you're right: "How much compute?" is a big unknown. But the lower bound is much lower than most people realize (and most researchers).
- fxtentacle 5y agoMy personal experience was the opposite. I'm currently trying different approaches for building a Bomberman AI for the Bomberland competition that was discussed here on HN a few weeks ago. "IMPALA with 1 learner takes only around 10 hours to reach the same performance that A3C approaches after 7.5 days." says the paper, but I can run A3C on a cheap CPU-only server but to get that IMPALA timing, I need to spend a lot of money. But my biggest roadblock so far is that I need compute far exceeding what the papers claim. The diagrams for IMPALA show good performance starting at 1e8 environment frames and excellent performance at 1e9 frames. By now, I'm at 2.5e9 frames and performance is still bad. In my opinion, the reason is that the sequence lengths for Bomberland are quite long. To clear a path, you place a bomb, wait 5 ticks for it to become detonatable, then detonate it, then wait 10 ticks for the fire to clear. With 7 possible actions per tick, the chance of randomly executing this 17 tick sequence becomes (1/7)^17 = 4e-15. If I calculate optimistically that all moves are valid, too, while we wait, then I can get up to (1/7)(5/7)^5(1/7)*(5/7)^10 = 1e-4. But that still means that at 1e8 env steps, I only have 1000 successful executions to learn from.
- WilliamDampier 5y agoso this is what Grimes latest song is about?
- junon 5y agoYeah wtf, was my first thought. This is mind blowing if true.
- junon 5y agoActually she probably got the name from the sci-fi novel this is named after: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_Games
- 323 5y ago> All the lyrical evidence that Grimes’ new song ‘Player of Games’ is about ex Elon Musk > Grimes seemingly makes multiple, thinly veiled references to Musk in the song https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/grimes-elon-musk-player-of-games-b1970331.html https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/...
- cwkoss 5y agoSpaceX's landing pad barges are also named after Culture series starships
- BeenChilling 5y agoI want to see deepmind make a bot to play team based first person shooters like csgo and rainbow6 siege, to stack up five of them against a team of professional players.
- fho 5y agoHonestly that probably won't be too interesting as (a) one AI could perfectly control several agents (ie perfect coordination of global strategies) and (b) an AI has low to no reaction times and perfect aim (aimbots already have that) so I would expect that would quickly result in a slaughterfest.
- arethuza 5y ago"...such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon..."
- gverrilla 5y agoSame applies to dota2, and it was very interesting what they did there. But yeah first they would need to simulate how human players react and aim, or it would be impossible to play against.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago(a) make them independent (b) add 100-200ms delay
- arlort 5y agoWhat would be interesting would be 5 independent AIs (even just different instances of the same AI of course) using the same interface as human players, so the same controls and the same video output I am pretty sure aimbots access the internals of the game rather than reading the video output to identify the silhouette of the enemy.
- ausbah 5y agoIIRC multi-agent domains are in their own category specifically because a single agent posing as "multiple agents" usually can't solve such environments, you need multiple agents with varying degrees of dependence
- antonpuz 5y agoAnyone knows whether the agent is publicly available?
- mudlus 5y agoYawn, show me a computer that game make fun games
- TaupeRanger 5y agoYou're getting downvotes but honestly I agree. Who cares about board games? We should've moved on from this once we "solved" chess and Go. There are more important things and it's not remotely surprising that a computer can beat a human when there's a simple, abstract optimization problem to throw computing power at. Make it creative...now that's a challenge worthy of the top AI talent.
- newswasboring 5y agoI agree. I have always wondered if I can feed GPT-3 a bunch of rule books and ask it to generate game rules.
- kadoban 5y agoYou haven't seen AlphaGo play Go then, it plays creatively as hell at points.
- TaupeRanger 5y agoIt might play creatively, but it doesn't create any useful knowledge by doing so, making it kind of amusing but not the kind of creativity anyone is really interested in.
- kadoban 5y agoIt creates useful Go knowledge. What else could be asked of it?
- TaupeRanger 5y agoNo it doesn't. Human Go players got worse after playing it. No one learned anything useful. The "knowledge" (if you can call it that) is all contained in an abstract, uninterpretable form that is of no use to anyone.
- loxias 5y agoPsh, wake me when it can play Mao. ;)
- pixelpoet 5y agoAnyone else surprised to see that Demis Hassabis didn't have a hand in this research? Given his background as a player of many games, and involvement in a lot of their research.
- thomasahle 5y agoI'm more surprised David Silver isn't on it, since his background is in imperfect information games, with papers such as https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01121 https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01121 He did multiple poker papers before he was the main author of Alpha Zero.
- tsbinz 5y agoComparing against Stockfish 8 in a paper released today and labeling it as "Stockfish" is bordering on being dishonest. The current stockfish version (14) would make AlphaZero look bad, so they don't include it ...
- dontreact 5y agoThe name of the game here is generality. For a really general agent, they are looking to have superhuman performance, not get state of the art on every individual task. Beating stockfish 8 convinces me that it would be superhuman at chess.
- remram 5y agoThey could still be honest that it's Stockfish 8, not the Stockfish everyone has. Your product having genuine value does not excuse lying about that value.
- Skyy93 5y agoI observed this kind of behavior in many papers nowadays. This extremely painful for research, because some better candidates could be overseen and FAANG publishs a majority in the ML-paper section. Its a mess.
- ShamelessC 5y agoThey were? They say they use Stockfish 8 the very first time they mention it.
- hesperiidae 5y agoYup, "In chess, we evaluated PoG against Stockfish 8, level 20 [81] and AlphaZero."
- remram 5y agoFirst time they mention it is page 10: > one of the strongest and most widely-used programs is Stockfish [81]. Here's the citation, note the date: > [81] The Stockfish Development Team. Stockfish: Open source chess engine, 2021. https://stockfishchess.org/ https://stockfishchess.org/. They mention the version number only once, further down, and don't point out that it's out of date since February 2018. All other 11 mentions of it don't have the version number, like in that sentence: > In Chess, PoG(60000,10) is stronger than Stockfish using 4 threads and one second of search time.
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- cab404 5y agoSCP-like name for SCP-like neural network. "SCP-29123 Player Of Games"
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- SuoDuanDao 5y agoI didn't even know about the book until I read the comments here, I thought it was a reference to the Grimes song. Funny coincidence the song and the engine would appear so close in time to one another.
- Severian 5y agoThe Grimes song is a reference to the book too. She also has Marain subtitles in her video for "Idoru", which is the language used in The Culture. Weird mix of two author's (Idoru being William Gibson) works to be sure.
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- crhutchins 5y agoI'll try to look into a brighter light into this one.
- wiz21c 5y agoCouldn't resist : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1F7vaNP9w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1F7vaNP9w0
- ArtWomb 5y agoThis seems like a significant milestone in AI. I mean what can't an agent with mastery of "guided search, learning, and game-theoretic reasoning" accomplish?
- ausbah 5y agomodeling every task as a game seems like a big hurdle, or even just getting a working "environment"
- hervature 5y agoI think this is a good step forward that generalizes an algorithm to play both perfect and imperfect information games. However, table 9 shows (I believe it shows, it is not the most intuitive form), that other AIs (Deepstack, ReBeL, and Supremus) eat its lunch at poker. It also performs worse than AlphaZero at perfect information games. So, while a nice generalizing framework, probably will not be what you use in practice.
- skinner_ 5y agoIt would be awesome to have two interacting communities: AI experts building open source general game playing engines, and gaming fans writing pluggable rule specifications and UIs for popular games. A bit of googling shows that there is a General Game Playing AI community with their own Game Description Language. I never really encountered them before, and the DeepMind paper does not cite them, either.
- dpflug 5y agoLast I looked, the GGP community is focused on perfect information games currently. I had the same thought, though.
- simonebrunozzi 5y agoCan this be realistically used by game companies to provide a much better AI experience for strategy games?