this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Maybe we should stop to call "AI" everything that is able to solve something by bruteforce.
A true AI, given the board and the rules, should have understood in less than a picoseconds that it need to avoid the holes, like a human does. What this AI did was simply to learn the rules, and a human is still faster in this (at this game at least).
Man, the game has the solution drawn on it. A human perfect the algorithm in less than 6 seconds and it probably solve the game in way less than 6 hours. The point of the game is to follow, not to find, the path.
AI is shorthand for a neural network algorithm that learns to accomplish a task through training instead of being told (very explicitly) how to do it by a human. There's no point in arguing about how people use language. It's completely arbitrary. You better get used to people calling neural network programs AI because it's not going away.
You have a very deep misunderstanding of the complexity of this feat and so I'm not surprised you don't think its impressive. Just follow the path... So easy! -_-
At the start of this task, the AI knew almost nothing. All it knew is it had "hands", and it had a directive to get the ball to the end.
It didn't know any of the following:
You see what I'm getting at here? It understood nothing! Sure, you can explain the rules to a human and they'd be able to start learning how to play, but the real learning is learning the hand eye coordination to get the ball to do anything you want.
Even the concept of "explain the rules" is not simple. Sure it's simple for a brain that evolved over millions of years and uses natural language. But explaining rules to a computer means programming it. You have to hard code all of the rules of the game, and in this case, all of the physics of the game. You have to write the code that explains all of that to a traditional computer before it can even start attempting to play this game.
This AI needed none of that. It learned everything on the fly!
Ha! It's clear you've never played this game. Even if you could get your first win in 6 hours, you wouldn't then be able to repeat the win every time thereafter.
This AI solving the game in 6 hours is literally the equivalent of one year old baby learning to play and finishing the maze in 6 hours! That is jaw-droppingly amazing, like the author says!
How are you not impressed?
(All analogies are bad. The baby would never have the attention span or motivation to actually play the game. That's the one inherent advantage the program has. It does what it's told. Plus the AI has perfect motor control right out of the box. It doesn't know that it's spinning motors, but it's control of them is perfect, and a baby is still learning how to make their muscles do anything at all.)
Ok, but that another thing and still it is not to master the game.
I really doubt that the "AI" know nothing at the beginning, it can not know the rules but it needed to know what goal should be else, why the goal could not be to put the ball in the furthest hole from your starting position ? Or in every hole ? Or to go to every possible position that is not a hole ? For all what the "AI" know, these could be more rewarding ends, don't you think ?
I am from a generation where this were the only games... aside trying to die out in the trees trying to do stupid things with the friends... I think I still should have one in the attic...
Just because I, like every other human, have not the precise control and microseconds reflex of a computer. Give this AI the same level of imperfect control and reaction times of a human and it will be the same. First win in six hours and no guarantee that the folliwing one would be faster.
Maybe because my first exam back at the university was to write a program that play Go against a human in Pascal (damn, how the hell I was able to pass that exam...) and the secod one was to write a program to colour a graphs so that two connected nodes were not of the same color in Assembler (Mips) in the same time the AI used to "beat" the game, starting from scrath.
I mean, it is a nice result but if, as it seems, you give the AI a different board and the AI is not able to beat it at the first try, then you simply used a neural network to brute force a problem in a game where the whole idea is to have a precise control of the board you are using.