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green_meklar t1_iw5gt91 wrote

For me, AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol in spring 2016 felt like more of a turning point in a technological sense. But I can see how the whole AI art thing happening this year could be more significant for the general public.

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PolymorphismPrince t1_iw5s7ba wrote

I really think there is no comparison between those in that AI art is far more important. GO is extremely complex, but working out a huge number of deeply complicated heuristics for playing is a difficult, but easy to envision process.

In the course of a year encoding so much of humanity's cultural output that one can generate original expressions of art that are just as complex and creative as what is made by humans? Surely that is on a completely different level?

I'm interested to see what you think though, and for example, what you think about the results in, say, starcraft, in comparison to GO.

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green_meklar t1_iw7z5vu wrote

The issue with something like StarCraft is that it's a real-time game and so you can get to superhuman levels of play just by being fast enough. I suspect that serious effort put into a GOFAI approach to StarCraft could produce an AI that can beat human players in general, not by making the AI smarter, but by making it just smart enough and leveraging its ridiculous micro advantage. For this reason, turn-based games are always a more meaningful testbed for intelligence.

On the other hand, Go has a problem in that it's a perfect-information game, which I suspect makes it easier for existing AI techniques to handle. StarCraft on the other hand has a fog-of-war where players must guess at (and remember) what other players are doing, and I suspect that games with limited information like that are a better test for real intelligence. The ideal game for testing intelligence would be a highly complex and nuanced turn-based game with a fog-of-war in place.

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faijin t1_iw84az9 wrote

> The issue with something like StarCraft is that it's a real-time game and so you can get to superhuman levels of play just by being fast enough.

AlphaStar limited the APM capable of the agent to prevent this.

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visarga t1_iw6a1qa wrote

Maybe it was 2017, the year when "Attention is all you need" was published. This changed deep learning completely and everything we do today uses transformers.

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keefemotif t1_iw7qxi0 wrote

Agreed, AlphaGo was the turning point. GPT3/Dall-E are very good compared to previous machine approaches, but are nowhere near human level quality. As opposed to AlphaGo, better than the world's best in a field that we never really expected to beat top humans in.

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