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by kayodelycaon 1343 days ago
Title is misleading. This is about classifying volleyball players and predicting their actions up to 2 seconds in advance. Which is really impressive. Humans do this automatically without even thinking about.

General artificial intelligence is a still long way away, but the slow progress and exploration is fascinating to watch.
2 comments
spywaregorilla 1343 days ago
I don't know volleyball well, but isn't it fairly deterministic within the window of 2 seconds? Like... your teammate just set the ball. What are you going to do? Isn't ALWAYS spike the ball?
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bluGill 1343 days ago
The ball is moving fast enough that for at least some moves the previous person hasn't yet touched the ball 2 seconds before, you cannot block a spike if you are not in the air before the spiker touches the ball. The spiker of course will be watching you and change how the ball is spiked based on that (if you don't make any attempt to block at all the spiker will drive the ball hard into the ground, if you do it is either find the hole in your defense to spike through, or tip the ball over the blocker making the return a lot easier)

I only played at a college class level (I wasn't the best in my class, not a pro for sure) - yet I can do the above.

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spywaregorilla 1343 days ago
But then in this case the spiker is still spiking, the blocker is still jumping, no? There is no particular room for alternative states for competent players?
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throwawaylinux 1343 days ago
I don't know if this is progress towards AGI. All life and all intelligence is just taking input and matching it against previous inputs and/or some hard-wiring as a way to make a decision. So in that sense you could say that any improvement in pattern recognition is (slow) progress toward AGI.

I don't know if that is useful though, because I don't know if there is some progression from this to that.

In other words, using such broad criteria means you could say that improvement to any pattern recognition or any algorithm that takes an input and decides something to create an output is progress toward AGI, but it's clearly not.

So I'm not really sure if all this is any more than a souped-up "tree recognition neural network on a 16x16 pixel grid" that was the staple of "AI" neural net homework back in the 1980s, or even the old "expert system".

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