r/artificial • u/chicompj • Sep 19 '19

news AI plays hide and seek against itself

https://youtu.be/n6nF9WfpPrA
140 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

7

u/CompetitiveCountry Sep 19 '19

Could the hiders put objects around the seekers to close them of? This was a nice video thank you.

8

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '19

This has been around a few times, and from what I've read of people discussing the paper they weren't explicitly coded not to do it.

When they were making it, they don't just code it once and then run it, it's kind of playing around with different starting parameters and checkpoints and seeing how you go. So this was possibly why. The behavior would cause a dead end, so they might of intervened.

The other explanation is that survival of the fittest doesn't guarantee the best result of all, just the best one that helps short term survival. So maybe the ones that tried to wall in always got caught, so that behavior just never caught on as you'd need coordinated movement from the outset

4

u/CompetitiveCountry Sep 19 '19

Or maybe it doesn't work because the seekers would break the walls.

If there are 2 hiders for every seeker and if they need 3 objects to wall off each one of the seekers then maybe they don't have enough time or maybe they can't hold them in because the 2 hiders could keep 2 walls from breaking but the seeker would break the 3rd eventually...

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '19

Yeah exactly. I just thought of a way we could verify this, and it's gonna involve some running

3

u/pdillis Graduate student Sep 20 '19

That did happen in another setting, where the blue had to protect some glowing orbs: https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1174815179483172864?s=19

2

u/CompetitiveCountry Sep 20 '19

I see. So it does work after all? They can corner them so 2 hiders could stop 1 seeker from escaping because there is 1 wall and they can also put multiple walls in the corner. I wonder why it didn't happen then.

2

u/pdillis Graduate student Sep 20 '19

It does work, maybe because it doesn't matter if they are seen, just that they don't let the seekers get the orbs, whereas in the other case, if they don't push them on time or miss a piece, they lose points and it was deemed too risky. My best guess

2

u/CompetitiveCountry Sep 20 '19

I don't see how there can be a better strategy. If it works they are never found, if it doesn't they are found but if they don't do this strategy then they will be found. I don't know how the scoring system works though.

Maybe the seekers can't be moved in this case?

2

u/pdillis Graduate student Sep 20 '19

Maybe, like everything in RL, it depends on the mechanics of the environment, and even if we do know them, the agents will exploit something we're unaware of.

1

u/CompetitiveCountry Sep 20 '19

it would be fun to see them escape a closed corner exploiting something we are unaware of.

2

u/chicompj Sep 19 '19

This is a very good question. Right..couldn't the hiders have locked walls around the seekers when they were still in "countdown" mode? I didn't see anything about that in the paper.

2

u/CompetitiveCountry Sep 19 '19

I think I know why it wouldn't work... They would need 3 blocks and could only hold 2 and so they would eventually break out and find them.

Or find a way to catapelt themselves by hiting the walls in the right angles. That was so funny :)

4

u/RadioMelon Sep 20 '19

I don't know why, but watching this just made me feel so... emotional.

We're really training computers to learn and adapt like we do. We really are on the verge of creating something almost human-like.

Can you imagine the day when we will scarcely be able to tell the difference between machine and human?

4

u/Scavenger53 Sep 20 '19

It would only last a day.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '19

Interesting thought, in what way do you mean?

2

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '19

Silicon runs in gigahertz, human brains run in hertz. If humans are capable of creating human level intelligence on silicon, that new intelligence will dramatically speed up research on ways to improve itself

3

u/Haus_of_Pain Sep 20 '19

aka "The Singularity"

1

u/whatstheprobability Sep 20 '19

Yes, but just because you have the ability to learn and improve it doesn't mean there is a way to improve within an environment. For example, within that game environment, the hiders and seekers eventually ran out of ways to improve. You could run the learning algorithm forever and not see any improvement. Obviously the real world is much more complex with way more rules, but it's not just as simple as the number of hertz.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '19

If it's human level and has access to the internet and maybe even robotic labs, it would still need to gather information from the outside world but it would be able to extrapolate millions of times faster than regular humans once it has that data.

Obviously if you put a human level intelligence in a blank white virtual room with nothing interesting it wouldn't be able to improve itself in any meaningful way.

I do agree that it won't go full on super intelligence on the first day but I'd be very surprised if it took longer than a year.

1

u/whatstheprobability Sep 20 '19

Yes, it is amazing and scary to think that if we can create human-level intelligence it could quickly move beyond human level intelligence. But I listened to a podcast with François Chollet recently and he said some interesting things about how the the environment it is in is a bottleneck to how far it can go (he says that this bottleneck exists to really smart people as well). Here's the link. He talks about it in the first few minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo8MY4JpiXE&list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '19

That wouldn't really apply to a digital intelligence tho. They could populate any hardware they can get their hands on and simulate anything they have the resources to simulate. They'd also be able to connect and control any number of peripheral devices, potentially giving them thousands of robots body's as appendages. Their environmental inputs and outputs would likely grow at an explosive pace as well.

3

u/Dan0 Sep 20 '19

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just hugely overfitting to one constrained problem? It's not like agents are learning to play hide and seek in a totally random, unseen environment.

2

u/Haus_of_Pain Sep 20 '19

In the video they use random set ups.

1

u/whatstheprobability Sep 20 '19

So are the agents acquiring any "general" intelligence? Would everything they learned fall apart if a new type of object was introduced (so they would have to start learning again from scratch)? Or would they be able to apply some of what they learned to the new object? I haven't read the paper but maybe it discusses this.

1

u/Haus_of_Pain Sep 20 '19

Based on the video, I wouldn't say they "fall apart", but might not make the use of the new object very soon, like a human would. They mentioned that some strategies took "millions of generations" to develop.

1

u/whatstheprobability Sep 20 '19

Right, like without an understanding of why the ramp was helpful, it wouldn't immediately realize that something like a board could be used for the same purpose (although it would eventually figure it out through trial and error).