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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly w
by kibwen 2y ago
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe", Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoI don’t understand what was learned here
- steelframe 2y agoReality is reality regardless of what you perceive. Presumably the argument is that training a neural net from a basis of complete ignorance is inefficient because we have facts with which we can initialize the model. So far as applicability to TFA, we can and probably should initialize or bias models that select candidates so their inferences reflect our values.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoSure but if you randomly initialize weights you can keep shuffling the initial state to discover new local maxima. Baking in an informed starting state biases the results and requires a new biased start if you wish to explore other areas of the gradient. Basically, the student seems to have a reasonable approach. So how does the lesson follow from the preceding paragraph?
- holowoodman 2y agoEven randomness isn't unbiased. A random distribution will have local minima and maxima, just not in all the same places in the next try.
- skybrian 2y agoI think it's ambiguous because tic-tac-toe is a solved problem, so presumably it's being done as an exercise to learn something about neural nets. If the idea were to write an AI to win at a harder game, it would make more sense to add whatever biases you can. You might get better performance that way. Or maybe that's what they thought back when that story was written? Game AI was nothing like we think about it now.
- marshray 2y ago> Reality is reality regardless of what you perceive. Except that in nearly all nontrivial topics we only see a small sample of reality. So even if we are lucky enough to be starting out with a set of only verifiable, reproducible, true facts, we are still biased in their selection.
- burnished 2y agoI think it means that 'random' is not the same as 'no preconception' in the same way that being unaware of the contents of the room is not the same as it being empty
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago“Conception” is an internal matter. Reality is external. The goal was to disconnect the internal from the external at time of initialization. The story reads similar to things written to the Atheism subreddit - phony importance written slightly in the style of truly consequential text.
- burnished 2y agoSkill issue
- dgeiser13 2y agoJust because you cannot see your biases doesn't mean they aren't there.
- anarchy79 2y agoJust because you can't doesn't mean they are. There is a difference between purely cognitive biases and moral ones.
- anarchy79 2y agoAumm mani padme aumm.