[MAXPOOL]

I am just an NPC until I get coffee.

For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It's cheap tricks and obviously fake but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a new trick you want to try in real life.

Marvin Minsky once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge." If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Combining many tricks together can create illusion of generality that is very convincing.

[MereInterest]

> If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world.

Wikipedia has an interesting list of cognitive biases [1]. Going through these, I tend to think of all of them as heuristic failures, where those shortcuts and incomplete solutions are pushed to edge cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

[ben_w]

I’d go further and conjecture that our cognitive biases are necessary, that the “theoretically perfect” models that these biases are compared against when being called biases are actually spherical cows in a vacuum.

However, I’m not a neuroscientist, and my knowledge and use of A.I. is limited to hobby projects.

[MiracleUser]

Necessary to what end? It could be necessary to maximize survival for the species, but that doesnt make it necessary to maximize survival for an individual.

It's perfectly possible our heuristics are muddied beyond necessity in order to generate variety in action, so as to reduce risk to the unknown for the species - even though it would cause a minority of individuals to consistently make sub-optimal choices. From a speculative standpoint, it's easy to find examples of people doing things that we consider 'stupid' but it pays off because of some unlikely event occurring in coincidence.

Reality has a lot of unknowns. There is no perfect model that could account for that. It's possible being hyper-intelligent (beyond our current ability) is (or was) a disadvantage for the species

[orestarod]

Take depression and nihilism for example. Great intelligence can overcome the very drives that makes us want to keep living - which is an arbitrary cause, and an extremely tedious activity.

[Reedx]

> evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers

Yeah, that's the thing - the brain and body evolved for a much different environment than the one we find ourselves in today.

So some aspects which used to be advantages are now disadvantages that we have to actively manage with things like exercise, healthy diet, meditation. Which the brain fights against.

[nwienert]

I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks at all.

Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks” were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked.

I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just don’t really know well yet.

[robotresearcher]

> I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do

But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.

[nwienert]

Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things - it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked.

Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.

[grawprog]

>I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts.

Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people each with their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.

[nwienert]

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time.

It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get anywhere useful. Meanwhile a brain literally requires as little duct tape as possible if you want it to be generally good.

[grawprog]

>It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy.

I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the way I learn and the way i've watched other people learn or the way i've seen people learn while i've been teaching them or training them. That and the general way everything kind of works. As amazing as everything in the world seems, when you break everything down to the smallest components, they all rely on the same skills and techniques we've been using since we were picking berries and hunting mammoths. The materials, accuracy and scales of our work have changed and improved dramatically, but fundamentally, most of what we do can be traced back to the same old things we've always done. We're just really good at building on layers and layers of things and applying things and knowledge to novel concepts and ideas.

Take music for an example, we just keep making the same music over and over and over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the point where most people don't realize they've been listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.

[dkersten]

The cognitive biases linked in another comment and other general failure of our reasoning and logic (or even how our pattern matchers work too well, seeing patterns where there are none, looking at you, clown-shaped-cloud) tells me that there are still shortcuts, errors and less-than-elegant. We make mistakes in reason and thought all the time, sometimes fatally. I don't think that diminishes from how incredible the brain is and how adaptable and generalised its function is, I just don't believe that it doesn't take shortcuts given all of the errors we make.

I'm a hobbyist at sleight-of-hand magic and therefore like to read and watch lots of material on the matter (eg the book "Sleights of Mind" by neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, and science writer Sandra Blakeslee) and there are an incredibly many ways to fool or trick the brain into believing untruths, even obvious ones.

[navjack27]

It's not kludgey until it's "certain" about something and then it just offloads to past experience reaching temporal projections.

[nwienert]

Sounds like the right way to do things. I mean people aren’t perfectly intelligent, but being a bit stubborn about things even when you’re wrong sounds like a safe strategy in world of incomplete information. If people were less wrong-headed-confident they may not defend important other things they don’t know 100% to be right.

It’s a heuristic that can be wrong, but the heuristic itself isn’t kludgy just the occasional specific use case can be wrong.

Here’s an analogy: any individual ant does many things that look stupid for its own survival. But would you call the ants thinking “kludgy”?

[jstummbillig]

> We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses.

Can you elaborate?

I recently learned that current appendectomy procedure (at least in Europe) calls for the removal of the appendix even if a surgery should reveal that the organ is in fact completely healthy – because the procedure from that point is considered so unrisky, and the organ considered so useless, that the potential future risk of a medical professional misinterpreting the existence of an operational scar as an indicator of a previously performed appendectomy is deemed more problematic.

[chychiu]

One recent theory suggests that the appendix acts as a safehouse for beneficial gut bacteria in the event that the gut microflora is wiped out:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551545/

[lonelappde]

The kludginess of brains is textbook neuroscience, from instincts to reflexes, to illusions and more.

Indeed, Game AI puts the "Game" first -- as it should for Games, but to the detriment of anyone who cares more about AI and wants Games to be a fun place to study AI.

If we split Game AI into "problem solving" (like pathfinding) and "opponent personality", then we can recover a lot of good AI that generalizes beyond games, without being misled by the parts that only useful for tricking people in a toy environment.

[echelon]

> Marvin Minsky

Can we still cite Marvin Minsky in the AI field given the allegations that have arisen regarding his relationship with Epstein and sex trafficking?

We should find better luminaries.

I'm all for redemption and I hope Stallman comes around and apologizes, but Minsky went to the grave with whatever happened.

[echelon]

Instead of downvoting me without a stated reason, can you provide a refutation? I'm open to changing my mind, but this is where it stands right now. I think we need to choose those we hold in esteem.