[saberience]

That's not how any of this works. We do not have "millions of years" of information encoded into DNA. DNA doesn't store that much data. In fact, it's about 1.6 gigabytes only! And most of that information is basically a ruleset for growing proteins which become our body.

All the stuff we've learned about games and so on have come from our current lifetime. I don't have caveman memory for how to fight a tiger.

[derefr]

I said "deep net" for a reason. A DNN model almost always turns out to be far, far smaller than the training data that was used to create it.

For one example: any smartphone's face-recognition feature. Each such feature is a DNN which took millions of hours of face data to train... but the resultant model fits on an ASIC.

Our DNA doesn't directly encode such a model, but it encodes a particular morphogenic chemical gradient, and set of proteins, that go together to make specialized neural "organs" (like your substantia nigra, or your basal ganglia, or your superchiasmatic nucleus, etc.) which manage to serve the same function to your brain that access to a pre-trained "black box" DNN model would serve an untrained NN in achieving transfer learning.

[saberience]

Our DNA is NOT a trained deep net, nor is it a deep net period. Our DNA is a string of proteins which encode other proteins which gives the series of tasks needed to create and operate all the structures of the brain and body.

The "training" of our deep net happens during our lifetime. We are not born with a trained deep net so your analogy that somehow we are born with a highly capable deep-net encoded into 1.6GB of DNA makes no sense.

Can you imagine how capable a human being would be if it was born into a world with no other humans or learning sources? Imagine a new born baby born into a world with some accessible food/water close by so it wouldn't die from lack of nutrition or wild animals, but crucially without any other humans. It would be utterly fucking useless, no language/reading means no way of assimiliating new knowledge. That baby would end up being a totally incapable human, regardless of the DNA or structure of the brain.

As far as we currently understand, if infants aren't exposed to language and communication at a very young age, they are either incapable or severely stunted in terms of communication for the rest of their life.

My point is, that we are very much dependent on the learning that we get from the point of birth ONWARDS. We get the amazing capacity to learn from the structure of our brain and body, but we'd be absolutely incapable idiots without other people to teach us, our books, language etc. We understand "games" and game theory from playing games with other kids, we're not born with "game theory" encoded into our DNA as one other commenter seemed to think, the same for language learning, and everything else.

Anyway, the point of this whole debate was that it's incredibly impressive that humans can learn to play a game as complex as SC2 in a tiny fraction of the time it takes a cluster of GPUs using a huge amount of energy and resources. Not forgetting that we also have to use a physical body to control our actions in the game, which adds a whole other level of complexity since we have to understand how to manipulate a mouse/keyboard etc, whereas the AI is essentially acting directly with the game, like a human with a neural link. The other kicker, is that if you just changed one aspect, like picking a new map neither player had seen, the AI would be sent hurtling back to square one whereas the human would only be partially affected. These series of demos only make me more impressed that given the huge resources given to Google, they can just about beat a human and even then after 200 years of training time and various other artificial advantages.

[slphil]

You are willfully missing the point. Animals have instincts. The complexity of humans does not make them an exception to this rule. There are in fact large amounts of brain function that are baked in at birth (or developed in a predictable timeline after birth -- humans are basically born premature). Humans are able to instinctively perform behaviors which are not taught, although the majority of critical behaviors in humans are socially learned. Feral children (like Genie) are functioning organisms with complex behaviors. They're just defective humans because humans rely on a distributed learning system called culture in order to do the work that biology cannot.

You are insisting that because humans do not have instincts at a certain level of abstraction (playing video games) that no part of these instinctive brain functions play a role in the development of skill at Starcraft. This is wrong. Abstract reasoning is not simply learned, but it is HONED by experience and neural development. An AI has to do an enormous amount of work in order to replicate functions that humans can already do. This is the basic visual problem in AI that stumped researchers in the 60s who thought that tasks like visual recognition, spatial rotation, etc would be trivial because they are trivial to evolved organisms.

You're relying on some kind of mental model where brains are just masses of neurons that form all of their connections and complexity after birth. This is ultimately a political idea, and it's wrong. No neuroscientist believes this. Brains have pre-defined areas (with fuzzy borders) and many behaviors do come baked into the template. Complex behaviors like language do not, perhaps, although even there, the underlying functionality that permits language is an evolved trait (which is why other animals can't learn language). Research the FOXP2 gene, as just an obvious example.

Edit: Your post contains "structures of the brain". What exactly do you think the structures of the brain are, if not evolved modular solutions to complex problems? Your visual center is somewhat trained after birth, but it already exists. The same goes for speech, motor control, and all of the other unconscious or semi-conscious processes that all humans (and other animals as appropriate) share.