DailyDirt: Computers Are Beating Us At Our Own Games

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Wed, Mar 9th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

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]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: 20 questions, ai, game algorithms, go, rock-paper-scissors, starcraft
Companies: microsoft

14 Comments

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Rekrul, 9 Mar 2011 @ 5:23pm

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.

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.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Mar 2011 @ 5:38pm

Re:
On the other hand, if you'd told me the basic premise of the anime Hikaru no Go, I'd have said that it sounded like a horrible show doomed to failure. (Indeed, it's a pretty bad show, but it was also quite successful.)
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snarkosaurus (profile), 9 Mar 2011 @ 6:01pm

Backgammon
Computers have been playing world-class backgammon for over 15 years: http://www.research.ibm.com/massive/tdl.html
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Jose_X, 9 Mar 2011 @ 6:31pm

rock paper scissors is random
If a computer can win at this game it is because it "learns" to take advantage of biases in the human opponent. And even in this case, if you know the precise algorithm (maybe a neural network with certain bias values), you can beat the computer (maybe).
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freak (profile), 9 Mar 2011 @ 6:57pm

Re: rock paper scissors is random
I'm fairly certain the demonstration program cheats.

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.
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Michael Ho (profile), 9 Mar 2011 @ 9:28pm

Re: Backgammon
Computers have also solved checkers and tic-tac-toe.... :)
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Richard (profile), 10 Mar 2011 @ 3:58am

The Microsoft Go Program
Is quite weak - even compared to other Go programs - none of which is currently very strong in human terms.

The headline should be

"Programmer sponsored by Microsoft writes moderately good AI Go program using existing methods and adapts it to mass audience."
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Jose_X, 11 Mar 2011 @ 12:11pm

Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
before falling asleep yesterday morning I was ahead 10w,6t,4l after slowly trying to play a hand that I felt a typical human would not (eg, I repeated scissors 5 times in one streak and came back to it again). Then woke up and played with some but less care (not to mention that my head can't remember the effects of all of those games) eventually giving up when the computer got to 100w (I had about 115 at that point).

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).
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Jose_X, 11 Mar 2011 @ 1:26pm

Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
I'm a little hooked on this thing now.

This time I lost 92w,96t,100l.
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Jose_X, 11 Mar 2011 @ 2:20pm

Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
won 100w,83t,98l.
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Jose_X, 11 Mar 2011 @ 3:41pm

Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random
was leading 78w,100t,73l. (started this set at 0,5,10)
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Hoeppner, 25 Mar 2011 @ 1:31pm

The AI kicked my buttox... It's not cheating either you can look at what the AI is thinking before it moves, and it will always do what it was thinking.
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rico, 9 Apr 2011 @ 6:36am

I did play with AI and sometimes it's beat me but I think that's normal 'cause the computer record every possibility and make a pattern about the play.From that we know that the computer had playing pattern too so if we can guess the pattern then that things will be easily beated.
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dennis the menace, 5 Sep 2011 @ 11:44pm

about computers
Maybe arnold schwarzeneggers movie rise of the machines will one day come true who says that computers won't one day out smart humans.
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