FZ1 (u/FZ1) - Readit News

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

marcinzm · 6 years ago

No, the point of AI is to have agents achieve goals based on observing an environment. Nothing says they have to be complicated agents or not explicitly programmed. Any book on Computer Science AI will be largely filled with agents that use rather explicit logic and algorithms.

FZ1 · 6 years ago

Still incorrect. And I would urge you to read one of these books you reference - they ALL aim to achieve that agent's action ON ITS OWN - i.e., by learning from its environment, and NOT by being explicitly programmed.

Yes, there are many explicit if-else style programs in Russel & Norvig, & other books - but those are the 'training wheels', until better methods are developed. For actual AI, the training wheels are supposed to come off, and the agent learns and acts on its own.

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

marcinzm · 6 years ago

>any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.

This does exactly that.

FZ1 · 6 years ago

Every program that has ever existed does this. So, you're saying that all programs that have ever existed, then, are all AI. You make no distinction whatsoever.

I would say that the more a program thinks on its own which actions to take to maximize its chances of success, the closer to AI it is.

If it's doing exactly what it's explicitly told, then it's not really intelligent, is it?

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

didibus · 6 years ago

> There isn't any AI or ML.

You seem to acknowledge a distinction between ML and AI, but I'm not able to understand in your categorization, what would AI be?

FZ1 · 6 years ago

A* search, any kind of heuristic estimation, learning, or simulated reasoning. All of those things would count.

We don't need mathematical optimization to call it "AI", but there SHOULD be more than a simple if-then.

At least show me that you're path-finding. That's not even being done here - this is just path-following.

"I leave a trail, you follow it." Explain to me how that qualifies as AI. Simple BFS/DFS achieves a lot more than this - which is considered by most to not even really be AI.

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

jfkebwjsbx · 6 years ago

It is academic AI.

People simply have no clue what AI actually means and think it is only about sci-fi robots and ML.

FZ1 · 6 years ago

A* search counts as academic AI. If-then statements do not.

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

marcinzm · 6 years ago

AI does not mean ML, it is a broad field that is a superset and not a subset of ML. Or as Wikipedia describes it:

>In computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals. Leading AI textbooks define the field as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals.

FZ1 · 6 years ago

> AI does not mean ML

Hence the 'or' in my statement. Neither are present here.

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

winterismute · 6 years ago

I strongly disagree. For example, in this algorithm, there is "knowledge": the knowledge of the programmer that realizes that following a person moving can mean also follow one of the previous positions of that person (especially if we can revert to follow that person again at some point), and this knowledge is encoded in an algorithm using code, that is, yes, those "if-then statements" you seem to despise.

For years (but even now) Artificial Intelligence meant understanding how intelligent behaviors worked, and then understand what is the sequence of "if-then"s that could express those behaviors in an artificial setting. Use statistical inference is a "hack" (unavoidable, often) to cover the cases in which such behaviors seem to be too complex to be grasped - and then expressed - by one simple and/or comprehensive algorithm, but the (possibly unattainable) ideal would be having everything expressed as "pretty much an if-then statement" indeed.

FZ1 · 6 years ago

> the (possibly unattainable) ideal would be having everything expressed as "pretty much an if-then statement" indeed.

This is flatly incorrect - the point of AI is to have a machine achieve intelligent behaviors without explicit programming.

If an "if-then" must be written by a programmer for every single behavior, then this is called "programming". It is not called "artificial intelligence".

FZ1 commented on Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding abitawake.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/atomlib

FZ1 · 6 years ago

Why are they calling it "AI", though? There isn't any AI or ML.

You leave a trail for the enemy to follow, and they follow it.

It's not even path-finding, it's path-following. Which is pretty much an if-then statement.

It's a neat, simple approach, and fun to watch. But there isn't any learning, or knowledge, or other AI.

FZ1 commented on SIMD instructions opensourceweekly.org/issu... · Posted by u/_3lin

FZ1 · 6 years ago

Adding the obvious numpy vectorization - I presume that counts as an 'open source project'?

Or maybe this is limited to little personal projects, and not major libraries ?

FZ1 commented on Best Python Reference Ever github.com/gto76/python-c... · Posted by u/pizzaburek

wyattpeak · 6 years ago

While I agree the notation is a bit weird, I disagree that there is any standard notation for types. The Python docs in particular fail for exactly one of the things I like about TFA - it tells you the type of the output of each function in its angle-bracketed style.

Take, for example, the definition of the operation s[i:j] in the Python docs: the result is "slice of s from i to j". Is that the same type as the input? Is it an iterator? No information.

I doubt most people are confused about the output, but a reference is specifically for people who are uncertain about how a function works.

FZ1 · 6 years ago

You're right that there is not any official standard.

But almost every major library follows a convention that's very similar to the cpython docs.

If you're making a language reference, shouldn't it look like the language ?

FZ1 commented on Best Python Reference Ever github.com/gto76/python-c... · Posted by u/pizzaburek

FZ1 · 6 years ago

A key hallmark of Python is readability - which this cheat sheet has managed to royally screw up.

It looks more like an XML cheatsheet at first glance.

I work in python full-time for a living, and found myself having to re-examine several times to make sense of this wacky, non-standard notation.

-------

Edit:

Keep in mind there's a standard way to represent these options in a clear, consistent manner (lists, sequences, optional args).

No need to re-invent something that's hard to read and understand.

See: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#sequence-typ...