Microsoft traps and tortures poor little AI in soulless Minecraft world Microsoft's boffins in its New York research lab are encouraging a Minecraft character to teach itself how to climb a hill. Their work, described here, is an advertisement for AIX. No, not the Unix – Redmond's platform, due to be open-sourced this summer, that helps computer scientists test their machine-learning algorithms in …
"We need to solve the unsupervised learning problem before we can even think of getting to true AI," wrote LeCun, "and that's just an obstacle we know about. What about all the ones we don't know about?"
And THAT'S why AI is so incredibly difficult to master. Think about how a baby learns. Sure there is some trial an error (the same as what they are doing with Minecraft), but think about how much of that learning is because they are being taught or guided by someone who already knows how to do something. If the Minecraft world was the real world, it wouldn't work at all. You can't just keep jumping into lava pits or drowning in water, learn from it, and just start over and try again. Sure you can build this "database of knowledge" over time and use that as a starting point for the real world, but like LeCun says, what about the things you've never encountered?
The complexity of the human mind and its ability to reason and rationalize things is so much greater than any existing computer, it's almost hard to fathom. Computers can only do what they are told to do. Considering they've been around for less than a century while humans have been around for much longer, the ability to essentially create a human analogue in intelligence is mind-numbingly difficult (at least to make it even at a fraction of the level of the real thing).
Or perhaps you can. Evolution arguably involves that sort of thing, hence selecting organisms which have some sort of innate instinct (fear) of doing such things. The minecraft bots are just combining the evolution and individual organism learning.
That was a pretty good book. More about testing than learning like here, but excellent. Makes you think.
Wish more cheap Kindle SF was like that, rather than the crap Military SF published by the ton. By guys who probably wouldn't know actual tactics if it bit them on the ass.
"... and teach it frustration and boredom"
Well, I guess it's more inventive than a herring sandwich...
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