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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

You're still extremely optimistic about the 'intelligence' of state of art data driven approaches, even if they aren't general intelligence. I'm not sure where that optimism is coming from.

The chess example... "They were wrong about AI never beating grand masters, they're going to be wrong about X". Well, if you make the board bigger, there won't be an AI system that can beat a human.

Play Dota 2, but introduce a random variable that can't be known beforehand by anyone, like things in the real world, and the AI will always be beatable.

Great for specific domains, obviously, but your optimism about doing more advanced stuff, perhaps doesn't seem so grounded.

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> Play Dota 2, but introduce a random variable that can't be known beforehand by anyone, like things in the real world, and the AI will always be beatable.

I wonder about a board game that randomizes the rules in simple ways. A human could understand the rule changes and adapt. To what extent can software be trained to do that?

Sounds like you're talking about general game playing[0], where a computer is programmed to take, as input, the rules to the game, and then compete. Looks like competitions are against other computers, but this isn't an area I'd expect humans to dominate in, long-term.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_game_playing

People have already put work into finding chess-like games, or variants of chess, that humans can play well (especially if they have some familiarity with chess) but that computers will struggle with.

Arimaa -- where computers did eventually reach the point of defeating humans -- is an example of this. Arimaa tried to attack both "opening books" and move-tree searches, by allowing the initial position to vary every game and by having each turn consist of up to four individual moves by potentially multiple pieces. The official challenges also required that computer Arimaa systems run on commodity hardware, and did not allow for modifying the computer "player" in between games of a challenge. It got through twelve yearly human-versus-computer challenges before the humans finally lost.

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