| Thanks for the commentary togelius [1, 2] and deepnet [above]. Anyone interested in adding a soupçon of scholarship to Seth's project? Words do mean different things to different people, in different contexts.. There is a recent body of literature that explores the modern "maker" [3] movement. However, "maker" as a term may not have been a good fit for the OP's argument [1], which contrasted (academic) researchers with so-called "tinkerers". An alternative term for "tinkerer" might be "bricoleur", a loanword from French. (Roughly, it still means one who tinkers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage but has other meanings depending on the academic lens.) Given that we are discussing AIs that play, in the context of education, we can also go back to Seymour Papert's work on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... . Originally known for work on _Perceptrons_ with Marvin Minsky, AI researcher Papert later adapted theories from education towards the vision of "learning-by-making" and the (young) bricoleur [4]. This can approach can be seen in the evolution from 1960s graphical [turtle] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%2... to Lego https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book) to
modern day efforts to encourage coding-for-kids [5,6,7]. One of Papert's later collaborators, Sherry Turkel, discusses bricolage as it applies to programming -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage#Internet . When it comes to early education, Turkel argues for epistemological pluralism [8] and cites anthropologist Levi-Strauss in comparing analytic science with a "science of the concrete". We can appreciate both Seth Bling's concreteness [9] and Togelius's original papers for academics. Almost a decade ago, Togelius introduced Super Mario Brothers as a benchmark for reinforcement learning [10] and, with Karakovskiy, for AI more generally [11]. deepnet what's your interest in neural nets? [1] http://togelius.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-differences-between... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744694 [3] For example, https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=maker+movement [4] http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html [5] https://scratch.mit.edu/ [6] https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ [7] https://github.com/google/blockly-games/wiki [8] http://www.papert.org/articles/EpistemologicalPluralism.html [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44 [10] http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2009Super.pdf [11] http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/ |