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posted by martyb on Monday February 13 2017, @04:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the outsmarting-a-virus-is-not-easy dept.

You'd be forgiven for finding little exceptional about the latest defeat of an arsenal of poker champions by the computer algorithm Libratus in Pittsburgh last week. After all, in the last decade or two, computers have made a habit of crushing board game heroes. And at first blush, this appears to be just another iteration in that all-too-familiar story. Peel back a layer though, and the most recent AI victory is as disturbing as it is compelling. Let's explore the compelling side of the equation before digging into the disturbing implications of the Libratus victory.

By now, many of us are familiar with the idea of AI helping out in healthcare. For the last year or so IBM has been bludgeoning us with TV commercials about its Jeopardy-winning Watson platform, now being put to use to help oncologists diagnose and treat cancer. And while I wish to take nothing away from that achievement, Watson is a question answering system with no capacity for strategic thinking. The latter topic belongs to a class of situations more germane to the field of game theory. Game theory is usually tucked under the sub-genre of economics, for it deals with how entities make strategic decisions in the pursuit of self interest. It's also the discipline from which the AI poker playing algorithm Libratus gets its smarts.

What does this have to do with health care and the flu? Think of disease as a game between strategic entities. Picture a virus as one player, a player with a certain set of attack and defense strategies. When the virus encounters your body, a game ensues, in which your body defends with its own strategies and hopefully prevails. This game has been going on a long time, with humans having only a marginal ability to control the outcome. Our body's natural defenses have been developed in evolutionary time, and thus have a limited ability to make on the fly adaptations.

But what if we could recruit computers to be our allies in this game against viruses? And what if the same reasoning ability that allowed Libratus to prevail over the best poker minds in the world could tackle how to defeat a virus or a bacterial infection? This is in fact the subject of a compelling research paper by Toumas Sandholm, the designer of the Libratus algorithm. In it, he explains at length how an AI algorithm could be used for drug design and disease prevention.

Source:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/244057-how-a-poker-playing-ai-could-help-prevent-your-next-bout-of-the-flu

Related:

Poker Is the Latest Game to Fold Against Artificial Intelligence


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  • (Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:48PM

    by pkrasimirov (3358) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:48PM (#467024)

    I picture a future where you can get sick if you don't pay your monthly subscription fee for defense. That's basically paying for danegeld.

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