Talkshow science

Today I was interviewed by a group of students on the future of artificial intelligence. I am not an expert on that subject by any means, but this was for a course and as I have some ideas in this area I was happy to help them out.

A large part of the interview was on Ray Kurzweill’s claims that strong artificial intelligence will be achieved within a few decades, and that humans and computers will be integrated into a new transhuman whole. Kurzweill bases this idea on Moore’s Law, that says that processing capacity of computers doubles every 18 months. By extrapolation Kurzweill has calculated that computers surpass human capacities soon enough, and that we will thus see the rise of strong AI and transhuman beings.

On my main website I claim that within two decades we will see computer-controlled characters in games that are indistinguishable from human-controlled characters. I specifically claim this for games, as game worlds are rather limited. In my view, strong AI that works in the real world will take centuries to achieve, if we are able to achieve it at all. Thus, I seem to be in clear disagreement with Kurzweill.

True enough, I think that Kurzweill’s ideas are science fiction, fantasy, and a whole lot of wishful thinking. It is seriously misguided to believe that strong AI will arise during our lifetimes. Let me explain this with a metaphor.

Suppose that I want you to write a great novel, and I hand you a pencil and a sheet of paper. You tell me that you cannot write a great novel with a pencil and one sheet of paper. So I hand you another pencil and a second sheet of paper. You tell me that isn’t sufficient either. I now hand you two more pencils, a pencil sharpener, and ten more sheets of paper. Still not enough. And after having gone back and forth a couple of times, I have given you a whole box of pens and pencils in a rainbow of colors, several sharpeners, a stack of sheets a meter high, whiteout, some dictionaries, an encyclopaedia, and a bag of assorted writing paraphernalia. Now you have all the hardware that you could possibly need to write a great novel. Can you now write that novel?

Of course not. The hardware is a requirement, but not the most important ingredient for writing a novel. We know that a great novel can be written, because several great novels have been written in the past. But there is no recipe for writing a great novel. Sure, some forms of novels can be written without much creativity, but these will never be truly great.

In the same vein, we know that intelligence can exist because we can observe it all around us. We also have the capability to create programs that perform some specific tasks for which a very rudimentary form of intelligence is needed. And we know that building hardware that has the capacity of storing human-like intelligence might be doable. But having the hardware is only the first step for creating intelligence. And frankly, as we do not actually understand what intelligence is and how it comes about, we have no idea what the second step should be. We do not even know which problems we have to solve to create intelligence.

Obviously, a smart man such as Kurzweill who has studied the subject area knows all this. I can only assume that he makes his overblown claims because it helps him sell books and it works well in the talkshow circuit. It brings him fame and wealth, and he will not live long enough to be proven wrong.

Naturally, Kurzweill has been criticized by many scientists. But these do not get much attention from the media. That is not surprising. As a skeptic you can be sure that I will never be invited to Oprah.

God plays dice

Don’t worry, this is not a post about quantum mechanics. It is about randomness in games. Specifically, I want to discuss  the different kinds of randomness you can have in board and card games.

Typically, a game that works with dice is a game with randomness. In general, I do not enjoy randomness, and I am not alone in that. Still, there are games with dice that I enjoy. The reason is that there are different kinds of randomness. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish two: non-determinism, and imperfect information.

Non-determinism means that certain decisions of a game are resolved in a random manner. Imperfect information means that aspects of the game are unknown to one or more players. At first glance, one would say that only non-determinism amounts to randomness, while imperfect information does not. However, imperfect information can be the result of randomness, and that is the kind of randomness that I can enjoy!

Let me give an example of randomness: the game of Risk. In Risk, a player might decide to attack another player with a certain amount of troops. He then rolls dice to determine the damage that the troops do. His opponent defends by rolling dice. The two dice rolls determine how many troops are removed from the game. This is a typical example of non-determinism: the randomness gets applied after the decision to attack has been made.

On the opposite side of the coin we have a game such a Poker. Poker is a game of imperfect information. Each player knows his own cards, and open cards of his opponents, cards on the table, and the bids that the opponents made. They do not know the hidden cards of the opponents. Therefore, they have to make a decision in a situation with unknowns. There is no non-determinism involved, however; it is not as if the best hand will be decided by a die roll or something. The best hand is the best hand in the current situation, and the fact that part of that current situation is unknown makes the game interesting.

Some would argue that Poker has non-determinism in the dealing of the cards. That, however, is not non-determinism, even though it concerns randomness. The initial game situation is set up randomly, but that all happens before the first decision of a player. Therefore, Poker is purely a game of imperfect information.

There are no dice in Poker, but there are many games with dice that are imperfect-information games. An example is Backgammon. In this game a player rolls dice to determine his possible moves. He then decides which moves to make. The player has complete knowledge of the state of the game when he makes a decision, and the outcome of the decision is purely the result of his decision. However, whether or not it was the best decision depends on the situation in which the opponent must make a follow-up decision, and that situation will be partly decided by the rolling of dice.

To give a very simple example to distinguish non-determinism and imperfect information: suppose I have a game in which I have two pawns that move along a track. How far a pawn moves is determined by a die. Now, if the game rules specify that I should first decide which pawn to move, and then roll the die to determine how far it moves, that is non-determinism. If the rules specify that I first roll the die and then determine which pawn to move, that amounts to imperfect information. Personally, I’d say that the second game is more interesting than the first, as it may allow deeper tactics. Although I probably would still rather play Arkham Horror.

I recently stated in a newsgroup that the difference between imperfect information and non-determinism is similar to the difference between science and religion. In science, we examine in what shitty situation we are and take steps to get out of it. In religion, we place our trust in fate to get us out of shitty situations. I thought this was a fun observation but I got a warning from the moderator: I had not surmised that my (fairly innocent) remark might offend religious people.

The moderator was probably right. Still, the response brought me a slightly deeper insight in why I prefer imperfect information over non-determinism: it might be because I am a scientist. I don’t mind being thrown into a shitty situation in a game, and I don’t mind that my opponent gets into a less shitty situation. It is the situation I have to work with and which I have control over. It is a challenge to overcome, and the shittier the situation, the sweeter the victory if and when I manage to achieve it. On the other hand, winning because the dice fell favorably just feels hollow.

Well, yeah, I can relish in the knowledge that Fate was on my hand, but that means that Fate, not I, won the game. And frankly, if Fate really must win a game, I say let her pick her own game group.

Games and teaching

Last year I was invited by dr. Tomi Pasanen of Helsinki University to teach a one-week course on Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games to his third and fourth-year students. I went to the university three weeks ago, and met with 50 computer science  students, whom I taught for a week on decision making, learning, and designing of video game characters. Every morning I lectured for two hours, and every afternoon and early evening the students did practical exercises.

Actually, the whole week consisted of one big practical exercise: the students had to design team AI for a team of seven characters in a role-playing game. The goal of the team was to occupy several important spaces in a virtual environment, which would generate points for the team as long as they would be able to hold them. Naturally, the team would have to fend off other teams with AI designed by their fellow students.

On the last day of the course we held a competition, in which we tried to determine the best team AI. Twenty-two teams were entered, and I saw some really impressive results. Some students had concentrated on team AI, some on individual character AI, and a few had even incorporated some opponent modelling. All in all, the strongest teams were those who had focussed a lot of their efforts on individual AI, which they could do because they were familiar with the game being used. However, the top teams needed more than just individual character AI, they had to incorporate strong team AI too.

What struck me was that I had 50 students who were willing to spend the last week of their holidays to enter a very intensive and sometimes quite tough course. Moreover, almost all students really spent the whole day working on the course and the practical. One of the reasons they were willing to do so was, probably, the subject matter of the course. Moreover, the competition element drove them to deliver their best performance.

Naturally, for a course on Artificial Intelligence in Games using games in a practical is the most logical choice. However, I think that games are also an excellent medium to use in many other courses. Take programming, for instance. Usually in programming courses students have to develop quite boring programs such as simple banking systems or personnel administrations. Why not let them develop a game? Any programming concept that exists can be found in games. But you can also think of ‘higher-level’ subjects, such as  designing information systems, or human-computer interfacing, or artificial intelligence. Games can be easily used as the subject matter for those courses, too.

I know that students are already pampered quite a bit nowadays, so should we really pamper them even more by letting them work on fun stuff? I say the goal of all that pampering is to motivate them to work, and games are motivating. I saw this in Helsinki, but I have also seen it in other courses: if you give the students a game to work on, not much more stimulation is needed to get them to give their best.

There are colleges and universities who offer programs wherein students are educated to become game developers. Such programs attract students who dream to become game developers later in life. Unfortunately, there are not that many game developers needed, and what I have seen in the game industry is that they usually want to hire computer scientists, and not so much game developers.

Of course, the good game development schools make sure that their students are also able to become something different than a game developer. Such schools use games as a medium, not as a goal. Personally, I think that can be quite a smart move. It may lead to motivated students, who have a fun time and still learn a lot.

Later in life these students will discover that learning can be fun by itself. However, when learning has to compete with going out, drinking beer, and staying up late, teachers should go the extra mile to make the learning as entertaining as possible. And as long as the contents are covered, who cares what the medium is?

The decline of research

This post is concerned with something that is rather old news, but as the measure it discusses is going to be effectuated soon, it is still rather topical.

Since several years, the Netherlands has a minister of Education who is a scientist himself, and a pretty good one at that. His name is Ronald Plasterk, and for a long time he was a professor of molecular genetics and headed a research laboratory. When he took up his new job, I thought this would be a good thing as we would finally have a minister of Education who would understand what science really is about. And actually, up to a point I am quite happy with him in his current role. But one of his most influential choices does not strike me as very prudent.

Plasterk wants to spend more money on research, and I applaud that. The Dutch record of investing in scientific research is appalling. The problem is that Plasterk does not get any extra money for research: he has to make shifts in his budget. And he has decided to shift 100 million euros from the university budgets, the so-called “first-money stream”, to the NWO budget. NWO is the Dutch organization that gets to distribute money for scientific research.

The reasoning behind this move seems to be the following. At universities, professors and their assistants and associates have to spend about 50% of their time on research. So the universities get research money, which they spend on their “old staff”, thereby leaving insufficient money for new talents. NWO distributes money on the basis of refereed research plans. Therefore, NWO funding has a better chance to land in the hands of young, promising researchers who have good plans, as opposed to first-money stream funding. Of course, moving money from the first-money stream to NWO means that the universities have to lose some staff, and the remaining staff gets to spend less time on research on first-money stream funding. However, the universities can simply get the money they lost back again by submitting plans to NWO.

This all sounds nice, but there are two huge faults in the reasoning which is behind the plan. I thought someone who has a university background would realize that, but Plasterk might have been too preoccupied with his laboratory work to really get to know the problems that face universities today.

The first fault is recognizing that university budgets have been decreasing at about the same rate that student numbers have been increasing. The net effect is that while, indeed, 50% of the staff’s time should be spent on research, in practice the situation is that the staff only gets to work on research in their spare time. Virtually all research at universities is done by PhD students, who, for the most part, are paid by money that was received from NWO. So, the staff reduction caused by Plasterk’s shift of money actually directly affects the quality of education.

The second fault is recognizing that one has to invest a significant amount of time (and thus money) to write plans that are needed to get funding from NWO. All things being equal, every plan submitted to NWO has about 20-30% chance to be accepted. Writing a plan to get, say, a project of 300K euros approved might easily take three full weeks of work. With the acceptance rates of NWO that means that the staff has to spend something like one or two man-months for every 100K euros of research money. Basically, 10-20% of money is flushed away on writing and defending plans.

Naturally, one might say that a good plan is needed before research is started anyway, but frankly, my experience is that the scientific contents of a plan might be written in a few days, while the rest of the writing time is spent on making the non-scientific details of the plan as perfect as possible, to get a chance of getting it through the referee process. You see, a plan that is rated “very good” by referees has little chance of being accepted; a rating of “excellent” is basically a requirement. I even had the rather sickening experience that a plan of mine, which I spent two full months on, was rated “excellent” and judged by the final assessment committee as “should certainly get the money”, and then was rejected because it had to compete with just too many plans which got the same rating. An NWO employee told me once that the quality of your plan gets you half the way to the money, the rest is just plain luck.

Make no mistake, I think that NWO is doing an excellent job. When I did get plans approved I got money that could be spent on research for almost the full 100%. NWO only does the bare minimum of meddling in projects. The refereeing process is done well, and NWO is clearly enthusiastic about research.

However, NWO simply does not have sufficient budget to do their job properly. Currently it has to reject far too many good plans, on which too much writing time is spent that should have been invested in research. Supplying NWO with more money is therefore a good thing. But shifting it from university budgets will be counter-productive: in the end, there will be less money spent on scientific research, and university education will suffer from an even greater lack of staff.

Paper-thin quality

When I started doing research in artificial intelligence in games in 2001, I was one of the pioneers in this area. Such kind of research was seen by many as a bit ‘frivolous.’ I am glad to say that since then, this attitude has changed, and nowadays quite a few universities have scientists work on aspects of games. That is a good thing, because games comprise many elements that make them interesting for research. I might talk more about that in a future post, but in this post I want to make some statements about conferences in game research.

In 2001, there were very few conferences on game research. It was hard to find a place to submit papers to. Naturally, with the increasing popularity of game research, the number of conferences increased too. Nowadays there are several dozens of conferences and workshops in this area, and many more general conferences have a track on research in games. Personally, I am most interested in those conferences that focus exclusively on artificial intelligence in games, such as the AIIDE and the CIG.

Since I have contributed to quite a few of these conferences, I often get invited to act as referee. There was a time when I always accepted such an invitation, but nowadays I get so many of them that I sometimes have to refuse. This year I already reviewed about 30 papers for conferences, workshops, and journals. And I have noticed a disturbing trend.

The quality of the papers I get to review is decreasing rapidly. I am not entirely sure whether this is a general trend, or whether I have just been unlucky with the paper assignments, but I fear it is the first. Recently, I have been recommending rejections for about 80% of the papers that I get to review. And that is while I am a relatively ‘soft’ reviewer, who is usually willing to see if a paper is salvagable. Some of the grounds for rejection were:

1. Submissions to conferences for which they are not suitable;
2. Not being about scientific research;
3. Excruciatingly bad English;
4. Unoriginality and blandness;
5. Vagueness in reporting; and
6. Drawing conclusions that do not stand up to scrutiny.

I have a distinct feeling that many of the papers that I get to review are written by students. I have nothing against that in principle; I actually applaud having students write and present papers. But it is the job of students’ advisors to ensure that their papers are of acceptable quality. It seems to me that often advisors are keen to add their name to a paper but not assist in writing it.

Why do I get so many inferior papers to review? I think there are two main reasons.

The first reason is that game research is attractive, so many universities try to get on the bandwagon and do something in that area (nothing against that). Many universities also want to make a name for themselves, so they set up a conference or workshop around some theme in this area. But in getting papers they have to compete with all the other conferences and workshops that spring up out there. Some researchers have so many conferences and workshops where they can and want to send papers to, that they spread their research very thin, or write up very small results, or encourage their students to quickly write up their bachelor or master thesis results in paper format.

The second reason, and the most devastating one, is that the past has shown that many conferences indeed accept inferior papers. There are conferences out there that accept literally everything that is submitted to them. I have quite bad experiences with this. For instance, for a certain conference I refereed seven papers together with one other reviewer. We conversed about those papers and together rejected four of the seven. In the end we found that the conference organizers had simply accepted all seven of them.

Why do conferences do this? One reason is that they do not get a sufficient number of submissions, and to fill up their program they lower their standards. Another reason is that accepting papers boosts attendance: at most universities there is a policy that you only get to visit conferences where you have a paper accepted.

But what does it mean for me as a reviewer? Reviews take time, but they are a necessary part of doing science. Every scientist has to pay his dues in this respect. As a scientist, I do reviews to help out my fellow scientists, to boost research quality, and to get the occasional glimpse of interesting but yet unpublished research. What I expect from my fellow scientists is that they do their best to send in high-quality papers, with good research, grounded in science, focussed on an appropriate research area, and preferably written in acceptable English.

How do I respond when I get a paper that is unacceptable? If the authors attempted to do good research and write it down well, I do not mind writing a review that helps them to improve their work to acceptable levels. But if it is obvious that they just sent in a hastily thrown together piece of trash, then frankly, I feel insulted. I am expected to spend valuable time, which I could also spend on doing research, on reading and criticizing something that the authors themselves should have improved before submitting. They seem to say that their time spent on writing their paper is more valuable than my time spent on reviewing it.

All teachers know students who only start studying for exams after they failed one or more times. Evidently, such students aim to do the bare minimum needed for passing. I am wondering whether this attitude also persists with some scientists, whose goal it is to get published, no matter the quality of their work.

The main blame in this rests, in my opinion, with the conferences and workshops that set their standards too low. They encourage a bad attitude amongst authors. As a referee, my view is that they should simply not enlist my services if they intend to accept everything anyway. Yes, it sounds nice if your conference is ‘refereed,’ but if you accept everything, in practice it is not.

I think that, at present, we are in  shake-out phase. There are too many conferences and workshops in game research. Those that accept too much low-quality work will die out after a short while, simply because serious scientists do not want to visit them any longer. I think it is therefore in the best interests of conferences to keep their quality standards high. Quality over volume will persist in the end.