DailyDirt: Computers Are Beating Us At Our Own Games
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Artificial intelligence is a fun topic -- especially when it's applied to playing games with humans. The classic "man vs. machine" battles are always entertaining... until we hit the Singularity, and computer AI just consistently trounces humans in everything. Here are a few more examples of cool AI projects.- Microsoft Research is working on AI that can play the ancient game of Go -- and incorporating it into an XBox Live game called The Path of Go. This is a pretty cool project to try to get more people playing go, but adding avatars and some storyline about finding your missing twin doesn't sound like a more fun way to play Go to me. [url]
- Starcraft is another AI challenge that requires more than fast reflexes and a pulse. Instead of creating supercomputers that play MMORPGs perfectly, I'd settle for AI that just happily mines gold for me all day. [url]
- Computers can also beat us at really simple games that you wouldn't think need any intelligence to play. So don't play Rock-Paper-Scissors to the death, and never wage a land war in Asia. [url]
- Maybe football coaches should be replaced by computers, too. When your fantasy league is short human players, try a few bots as competitive players. [url]
- If only the neural nets that play 20 questions were a bit more useful... These kinds of programs were supposed to help diagnose medical diseases, but now they just play trivial games and advertise for Whoppers. [url]
- To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: 20 questions, ai, game algorithms, go, rock-paper-scissors, starcraft
Companies: microsoft
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
That's known as "Nintendo-izing" a game. Virtually every game ever ported to the NES/SNES had all sorts of extra crap added to it as well as some kind of background story.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Backgammon
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Backgammon
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
rock paper scissors is random
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: rock paper scissors is random
Against 100 random numbers, it managed 50 wins, 15 losses, and 35 ties.
Against 100 just me playing, the numbers were 51/13/36
I didn't go through very much, but making a decision through random numbers, then checking the computer's thinking everytime changed the ratio to 7/9/6. Takes much longer though.
Now of course, that still could be a statistical outlier.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
If the computer plays a learning "strategy" that you anticipate, you might beat it consistently, but generally, I'd expect any deviation from 33,33,33 to be a statistical effect.
BTW, try playing where you set a strange but noticeable pattern and later on change it to something very different and keep doing that. I think it will throw the computer off. Setting patters will be caught, and if you don't change later on you will lose (my old tricks stopped working, with the computer even repeating the same value many times matching me doing the same thing).
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
This time I lost 92w,96t,100l.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The Microsoft Go Program
The headline should be
"Programmer sponsored by Microsoft writes moderately good AI Go program using existing methods and adapts it to mass audience."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
about computers
[ link to this | view in chronology ]