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. 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


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  1. identicon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    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.)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    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

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    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).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. icon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

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

    Re: Backgammon

    Computers have also solved checkers and tic-tac-toe.... :)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. icon
    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."

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    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).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    Jose_X, 11 Mar 2011 @ 2:20pm

    Re: Re: Re: rock paper scissors is random

    won 100w,83t,98l.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    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)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  12. identicon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  13. identicon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  14. identicon
    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.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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