Robot Hand Beats You at Rock, Paper, Scissors 100% of the Time
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
So let me ask now, what happens if you get the robot hand to play with another robot hand?
First the robots both spot the other one appearing to go with rock and make a last millisecond change to paper. Then they both notice the other one making the change to paper, so they both go scissors... then they both go with rock again.
Loop!
When I took Machine Learning, we studied different "bots" in various contrived game scenarios to illustrate the effects of imperfect information, non-deterministic outcomes, and other kinds of noise.
The most interesting outcomes were when the bots learned to cheat. Since the system doesn't punish cheaters, it becomes a winning strategy. I think humans have learned not to cheat - for the most part - because at the most basic level cheating reduces the group's overall survival rate. E.g. stealing food from another member of the group.
tl;dr if cheating is so obviously the best strategy, maybe the game needs to be revised? Because for this robot, cheat-really-quickly leads to 100% victory.
Unfortunately, I've been unable to find any actual papers. :/
I'm pretty sure that our anti-cheating behaviors are mostly instinctive responses, rather than something humans learned. We have an emotional concept of "fairness" that causes us to punish cheaters. There's also no need to invoke group selection to explain this (which is good, because group selection has been pretty thoroughly falsified). Game theory gives us perfectly adequate explanations in terms of individual self-interest for why cheater-punishment is an advantageous behavior.
I would say stuff like that discourages exploration in science, and pushes an echo-chamber agenda.
To me it's rather clear that groups dominate individuals. Let's look at the level of groups of complete organisms. The individual is dominated from early childhood and is taught learned behaviors which may actually impede its reproductive success. For example, non-alpha-males in many species simply don't reproduce. That may be ascribed to kin selection, but the mechanism is not kin-related: if a wolf is adopted, the same mechanism applies.
In humans this can be summed up by one word: CULTURE. All the morality, etc. is taught from a young age, and the kids are dominated by the culture, and as they grow up they don't think of doing it any other way. If the culture told you that you can't have more than one wife, then that's what most men will approximately end up with. The man isn't going to go out and get a harem because modern society has basically trained this man that a shitload of problems await him should he try to do it. In other societies, however, the harem is fine.
So basically, the individual behavior is dominated by the group. Selection is a byproduct of that. In men, it typically selects for those traits which the most prolific (reproductively) men possessed. Genghis Khan is one of the ultimate examples.
There is a very strong individual pressure to conform to your tribe. Humans are extremely vulnerable on their own, but benefit hugely from being in a group. It is therefore of paramount importance for an individual to avoid being outcast from the group. I think it is likely that religion is more or less the name we give to the feedback loop that causes tribal conformation pressure to override rational analysis in an individual's belief selection process.
> Heck, even look at cells cooperating to make an organism - thats group selection at the most basic.
No no, that is kin selection in its most extreme form. Kin selection is very strongly backed by evidence, and differs from group selection in that the individuals have an above average statistical overlap in their genomes. For example, a brother and sister have an average of 50% shared genes, so genes that promote sibling cooperation can propagate more effectively than their complementary alleles, even if that cooperation causes some reduction in survival of the individual.
In the case of cells comprising an organism, the overlap in genetic material is 100% (excluding anomalies like mutation and HGT), so we see enormous amounts of individual cell sacrifice which prove advantageous in preserving those cells' genes by benefiting the other cells in the organism.
So I don't see why kin selection must be the sole mechanism to explain all kinds of group selection. The group dominates the individual by indoctrination from a young age, as well as by force. You can refer to all this as "culture". The group is smart enough to threaten the individual with things that the individual cares about, and the individual has evolved to be receptive to such correction by the group, and learn to stop doing something, even if it would give them a better reproductive fitness.
It just so happens that groups which live together start becoming genetically related down the line. But the mechanism that acts isn't kin selection.
Cant help, but quote from "I, Robot":
"Look, this is not what I do, but I got an idea for one of your commercials. You could see a carpenter making a beautiful chair. Then one of your robots comes in and makes a better chair twice as fast. Then you superimpose on the screen, "USR: Shitting on the little guy. That would be the fade-out."
When I see robots doing new stuff I don't worry about humans becoming obsolete (whatever that means), I look forward to the day when humans are freed from the grunt work they do now.
Some people worry about losing their jobs in the rock-paper-scissors industry, but I think this is a social problem that has nothing to do with robots.
I am not a neo-Luddite (nor Luddite, nor primitivist, all of which are different things), principally in that I do not subscribe to normative Luddite beliefs (beliefs about What We Ought To Do). But the Luddite fears are legitimate fears, for those affected; when the work you currently know how to do is replaceable with (sufficiently-cheap) machinery, it makes you personally poorer. (Of course, when MY job is replaced by cheaper machinery, it makes YOU personally marginally richer, because you get better prices on the goods that I used to produce, and over time this appears to be a net win).
And socially, we observe that increasing automation has, for the most part, not freed humans from doing grunt work, as they once did. Except for those people that have been "freed" into poverty. Admittedly, the poverty of today seems to me to be quite a bit nicer than the poverty of 200 years ago (esp. urban poverty).
Sure it has. Much less people work on the land now. Much less people shovel dirt, till land and harvest crops. Also I don't need to wash ky hands by hand, wash my dishes, and empty my chamberpot anymore.
That's not to say there is no poverty (there is), but its wrong to say there is the same amount of grudge work as there was 200 years ago.
But my assertion was not that "automation has not started doing any of the grunt work we once did". My assertion was that the segment of society that WAS doing grunt work is mostly not elevated out of grunt work TODAY. I assert that, rather, those people are mostly either still doing grunt work, or else are unable to find a useful role in society (a leftier turn of phrase would be "they are being abandoned by society"). I can certainly concede that there has been SOME improvement in this, but it's vastly less than starry-eyed optimists seem to suggest.
Remember that this followed mwd_1 stating a vision of the future, in which "humans are freed from the grunt work they do now", by which I assume (s)he meant not just today's variant of grunt work, but grunt work in general. Basically, my whole claim is that techno-utopianism is unrealistic, and it is unrealistic for social reasons, not technological reasons. Not that it stops me from wishing for it.
Oh, and a minor unimportant correction: the phrase is "grunt work", not "grudge work", at least in most English-speaking communities. Look it up.
Ah, now you're moving the goal posts. From "200 years ago X% of society were doing grunt work, and today X% of society are doing grunt work" to "x% of society are doing grunt work or are just loafing around". I agree that it's wrong that there loads of people who are unemployed, or working crappy jobs, but it's much better than when they had to shovel shit for 10 hours a day.
Tell a serf in the middle ages about the terrible future where people don't work till they're 16ish (sometimes 20), then sit around in housing estates all day doing nothing. Tell them how horrible it is.
Things have gotten better. We need to continue to make things better.
A lot of those crappy jobs involve the equivalent of shoveling shit for 10 hours a day. Jobs available to power in lower economic brackets and classes are demanding: retail, fast food prep, janitorial/custodial work, day labor, etc.
More importantly, just because a job doesn't require physical toil doesn't mean it isn't a soul draining experience. The fact of the matter is that increasing automation hasn't ended class division because automation schemes are employed to increase the profit of those in control of business. Improvements in technology do not automatically improve society, as most technologies get exploited to divert more wealth to few individuals.
(a) There are more labour laws now. You don't have to work as much. No more shoveling shit for 10 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. (b) There are health and safety laws now, if you were to shovel shit now, you'd have to have a mask etc. (c) There are more labour laws now, so that the employer has to provide tools and training. No more "shovel shit for 10 hours, you have to bring your own shovel, oh you're shovel got broken, you're out of a job" (d) There is more of a safety net. No more shovel shit for 10 hours, oh you broke your hand? Hope you can live without food until it heals. etc.
Those jobs suck, yes. But ask anyone doing them if they think mediæval shit shoveling is just as good (or better), and they'll say no.
The bottom line is that those at the top have always exploited technological advance for themselves while leaving others behind. This is a primary function of capitalism throughout history. That some conditions may have been worse in the past means nothing while economic oppression continues right now.
(Sure, it's fiction, but can we say for sure it could never come true?)
Interesting is the aspect that given 3 choices people will tend to fall into a pattern, albiet one influenced by what the other player does.
Also worth noting that variations of RPS exist for example Malaysians use water instead of paper, and in place of scissors is a bird, made by holding the fingertips together, forming the shape of a beak. The bird drinks up the water, the water sinks the rock, and the rock kills the bird." (from http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Rock_paper_scissors)
Funny thing is when computers cheat it is an achievement, almost feel descriminated against being a human who if cheated would not fair as well.
This is the beginning.
Well, it seems you still haven't read it because there is not anticipation according to the article:
> It only takes a single millisecond for the robot to recognize what shape your hand is in, and just a few more for it to make the shape that beats you, but it all happens so fast that it's more or less impossible to tell that the robot is waiting until you commit yourself before it makes its move, allowing it to win 100% of the time.
I suppose what you suggest might be possible eventually but that's not how it works at the moment.
Keep an extinguisher handy and don't let either robot phone NORAD.
Not until this thing can beat water hose.
How about a nice game of chess?