Written by Lan 2022 Cohort
AI Playing games
At the end of June this year, the well-known technology company OpenAI released a paper which mainly focused on an AI technology called “Video Pre-Training.” The results of this research are pretty gratifying. For example, after watching over 70,000 hours of Minecraft videos, the AI in the case has successfully learned the most essential survival skills: swimming, hunting, building a house, mine, and even raiding villages.
At the same time, another AI called “MineDojo” with similar functions also appeared online. Moreover, the research team put their code directly on GitHub for everyone to download and study.
Creating an AI of your own
It has been five years since AlphaGo “retired” from the game in 2017. Since then, “civilian AI” has been making its mark in the gaming world, and there are many YouTubers who use AI to play games.
Take River, a small YouTuber with only 7,000 followers, as an example. One of his videos succinctly shows the low threshold of AI technology.
The preliminary preparation is straightforward: you only need two computers, a program downloaded from the Internet, a video capture card, and a wireless mouse signal receiver. The work to be done is nothing more than to mark some pictures for AI training and recognition ability, a “small” segment of code indicating the behaviour pattern, and then directly scan the small map to indicate the direction, and then transmit the keyboard signal to the computer through the wireless mouse.
Of course, in the current performance, River’s AI is similar to ordinary AI robots, and there is no AlphaGo kind of magical self-evolutionary ability.
However, there is no longer that high threshold just to simply experience the AI design. It’s also fun to keep designing newer and stronger AI, one of which is distinguishing the “border” between right and wrong.
Closing words
Just as MineDojo distinguishes between programmatic and abstract tasks, when we teach AI, we can get our definitions of things and the resulting explanations from the results of the AI’s distinctions, which may inspire humans to solve the conflicts in their lives.
Considering questions like “How is your day going?” or “How do you introduce yourself to the other person on a blind date?” if each question can be answered by a program, it might reflect that humans have evolved to a higher level.