Today I Learned #4: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

[aimeeandbeatles]

Teaching an AI to RTFM before playing a game makes it learn to play that game 6000 times faster:

New Technique Teaches AI How to Master Atari’s Skiing 6000 Times Faster Than Traditional Methods

In a new article from NewScientist, a new AI program learned how to play and master an Atari computer game, Skiing, six thousand times faster than traditional methods. Older games are used as a benchmark to measure AI ability due to the simple controls of each game that in turn...

opendatascience.com

 

[elmurcis]

Teaching to read to understand manual? Sounds something that would be very useful for humans too (although there might be some harsh resistance to such experiment)

 

[The_J]

Teaching an AI to RTFM before playing a game makes it learn to play that game 6000 times faster:

New Technique Teaches AI How to Master Atari’s Skiing 6000 Times Faster Than Traditional Methods

In a new article from NewScientist, a new AI program learned how to play and master an Atari computer game, Skiing, six thousand times faster than traditional methods. Older games are used as a benchmark to measure AI ability due to the simple controls of each game that in turn...

opendatascience.com

They did that already for Civ2, and the AI is then pretty good too .

MIT scientists teach a computer Civ II

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have been researching on the field of computational lingustics, have been dealing with Civilization II and actually told the computer how to play it. They improved the actual winning rate of their own AI vs. the FreeCiv AI to 78% by...

forums.civfanatics.com

 

[EgonSpengler]

I never understood why the AI for Civ V and VI is so, so bad. It really bungles just about everything. Is that because those games are complex and creating an AI to play them competently is really hard, or is it because they figured most human players wouldn't notice a bad AI, and a good AI wouldn't help sell the game?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I wonder if future game developers will use actual AI for their game AI.

 

[Kyriakos]

Til that Abdera was founded by Herakles in honor of Abderos, son of Hermes, after he was devoured by the anthropophagic horses of Diomedes.
It's the birthplace of Democritos.

 

[Takhisis]

I never understood why the AI for Civ V and VI is so, so bad. It really bungles just about everything. Is that because those games are complex and creating an AI to play them competently is really hard, or is it because they figured most human players wouldn't notice a bad AI, and a good AI wouldn't help sell the game?

Civ never has had particularly clever AIs at least in its unmodded form.

 

[Kyriakos]

One thing civIII AI always does, is to bait you with easy kills and/or risk secondary stacks, so as to have you not focus your attack on the more crucial units. In other words: it just cheats, knowing everything about your own units (invisibility of next-in-stack isn't a thing for it) and having calculated when there aren't enough for all targets ^^

 

[Takhisis]

????

Are you sure you're talking about CivIII?

 

[Kyriakos]

Yes. It has happened in all of my games. When the AI computes that you can't keep enough units intact in an attack, it will always offer a bait (this ranges from just some undefended workers, to powerful but depleted military units which it offers up for the kill as long as you don't focus on the city).
That said, it's not certain that this is consciously coded to work like that. For example, many times the AI will move some attacking units out of a city that has very few defenders and may fall; a human player might do that if they'd hoped to use them to attack the fallen city in the next turn, but I doubt this is the case here- mostly they are bait.
Basically the constant is that you rarely see only one target, since the AI gives you some side-targets.

 

[Kaitzilla]

TIL Bugs Bunny was being sarcastic when he called Elmer Fudd nimrod.
Nimrod in the Bible was a great hunter.

Now nimrod means a silly and dumb person.


Also, rabbits aren't really into carrots.

 

[Takhisis]

Yes. It has happened in all of my games. When the AI computes that you can't keep enough units intact in an attack, it will always offer a bait (this ranges from just some undefended workers, to powerful but depleted military units which it offers up for the kill as long as you don't focus on the city).
That said, it's not certain that this is consciously coded to work like that. For example, many times the AI will move some attacking units out of a city that has very few defenders and may fall; a human player might do that if they'd hoped to use them to attack the fallen city in the next turn, but I doubt this is the case here- mostly they are bait.
Basically the constant is that you rarely see only one target, since the AI gives you some side-targets.

There must be some strange set of circumstances at work, because I always tend to just get a doomungous stack coming my way.

 

[Kyriakos]

There must be some strange set of circumstances at work, because I always tend to just get a doomungous stack coming my way.

I am only talking about when you initiate the attack. The AI indeed attacks with a stack of doom, often visible from half a continent away and as conspicuous as can be.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

TIL Bugs Bunny was being sarcastic when he called Elmer Fudd nimrod.
Nimrod in the Bible was a great hunter.

Now nimrod means a silly and dumb person.


Also, rabbits aren't really into carrots.

The carrot munching was a pop culture reference that the audience at the time would've understood but today is lost. It comes from the 1934 film "It Happened One Night", which has Clark Gable munching on a carrot while talking.

Bugs Bunny voice actor Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots. He had to munch on carrots as nothing else had the same sound, so after every take he had to spit out the munched carrot into a nearby bucket.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Bugs Bunny voice actor Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots. He had to munch on carrots as nothing else had the same sound, so after every take he had to spit out the munched carrot into a nearby bucket.

The allergy bit is an urban legend. I think he just hated the taste of them.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

The allergy bit is an urban legend. I think he just hated the taste of them.

It was mentioned in several of the documentaries on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs that he did have a reaction to eating carrots.

 

[Takhisis]

That could just have been from being forced to eat them all the time and developing a hatred for them.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Today I learned that Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, a flight going from Addis Ababa to Nairobi (literally the next country over, maybe 2 hours) ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean after being hijacked by some people who wanted to go to Australia. (I guess hijackers aren't very smart.) Also the captain of the flight had experienced two other hijackings before this. Sheesh.

 

[The_J]

TIL: Allergies can get worse during rain.
While normally the rain washes all allergens out of the air, there is also a subset of pollen who will swell due to the rain and burst, releasing all the allergens contained in them. So after a start of a rain shower, your allergies can get worse.

I think I'm experiencing this.

 

[PhroX]

TIL that, along with its more famous terms, the Treaty of Versailles contained a clause which obligated the signatories to accept a value of 435Hz for the note know as "Concert A", thus establishing a legally binding international agreement on how instruments were tuned.