Tom Murphy VII (tom7) is a researcher and programmer who makes unusual projects, such as NES game automation and a printable-ASCII C compiler.
HN commenters call his work crazy and great, pointing to his NES-playing technique, the portmanteau of every English word, and his videos.
It's natural to claim that's not generalizing since it's in such a specific domain as well as the fact that it had access to its score.
Yeah. I would like to see the same approach applied to NES games[0] with the capability of beating a game like Zelda or Ultima IV with no domain-specific knowledge. It's not going to happen. These games assume the player knows about human culture, values, virtues such as courage and triumph over the forces of evil. Symbols such as the sword and shield, the heart; they have deep meaning even to a person who has never played a video game before.
To build an AI that can play a game like that, without any specific knowledge of the game itself, would be to build something that likely reduces to general intelligence, though I hesitate to claim it forcefully.
[0] I am aware of this: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/
"Observed" after being fed lots of sprites and actual ways on how to play it and actually win at it in the objective function. And it "played" only one kind of game.
"Obvious path" riiiight.
In addition, this is wrong to having been said to be new, such attempts have been made before and even stronger in results and generality. For example this (relatively dumb) approach from 2013 generalized kinda well, much better than I've seen a silly even deep network generalize: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/
So yes, they are overselling it a lot. I am 100% not impressed by this paper as it lacks critical detail.
That it can parse stuff from 2D frames is not interesting, it is basic motion analysis which can be done even by a supremely stupid algorithm, not even a CNN.
I mean, Google best AI can play 15 rooms of a simple game...
I'm not sure that argument is a complete route of the strong (or at least, stronger) hypothesis. The conscious creation of new words is often done using fusions or appropriations of existing words, per Lakoff's Metaphors. Over time, the meanings shift and expand, but it's not a raw, instantaneous act of creation, that, to your point, would seem to be impossible under Strong Sapir-Whorf.
Now, we can, here and now, 'invent' a 'new' word from what we believe to be whole cloth. But it's hard to prove that that there's not some unconscious process similar to the above going on! That really all we're doing is finding the intersections of existing semantic distributions.
Incidentally, my favorite SIGBOVIK paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/papers/sigbovik2011tom7whatwords.pdf
Non termination is modeled as false: a function that takes an A and never terminates has type A -> F, or ~A.
There's some connection between classical logics and concurrency, though it's hard to get at. You can use callcc to implement threads, and Getzen's classical sequent calculus has multiple conclusions.
Here is a PHD thesis that uses modal logic to model distributed code in a CH fashion: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/papers/modal-types-for-mobile-code.pdf
Classical logic is perfectly modeled with callcc, which has the type Peirce's Law, and allows one to write terms with the types of the law of excluded middle or Double Negation Elimination.
This reminds me of AI research using NES Games. The AI eventually became proficient at completing Mario levels, and along the way it discovered novel strategies for survival, obtaining points, and finishing levels.
> Check out this timestamp to watch the machine "cheat": https://youtu.be/xOCurBYI_gY?t=9m55s
> Researcher's site about the project: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/
> The Paper: The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic
Orderings and Time Travel...after that it gets a little tricky.: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf
Indeed. I am also surprised that no one mentioned Tom Murphy's Sigbovik paper from April 1st 2013 - "The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic
Orderings and Time Travel ... after that it gets a little tricky"
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf
Murphy created an agent that can play arbitrary games by inspecting the RAM and attempting to maximize the score.
See also this writeup on Ars Technica - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/04/this-ai-solves-super-mario-bros-and-other-classic-nes-games/