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from the may-I-mambu-dogface-to-the-banana-patch? dept.
Bob: "I can can I I everything else."
Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to."
To you and I, that passage looks like nonsense. But what if I told you this nonsense was the discussion of what might be the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet? Negotiation software that had learned, and evolved, to get the best deal possible with more speed and efficiency–and perhaps, hidden nuance–than you or I ever could? Because it is.
This conversation occurred between two AI agents developed inside Facebook. At first, they were speaking to each other in plain old English. But then researchers realized they'd made a mistake in programming.
"There was no reward to sticking to English language," says Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). As these two agents competed to get the best deal–a very effective bit of AI vs. AI dogfighting researchers have dubbed a "generative adversarial network"–neither was offered any sort of incentive for speaking as a normal person would. So they began to diverge, eventually rearranging legible words into seemingly nonsensical sentences.
"Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves," says Batra, speaking to a now-predictable phenomenon that Facebook as observed again, and again, and again. "Like if I say 'the' five times, you interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn't so different from the way communities of humans create shorthands."
Indeed. Humans have developed unique dialects for everything from trading pork bellies on the floor of the Mercantile Exchange to hunting down terrorists as Seal Team Six–simply because humans sometimes perform better by not abiding to normal language conventions. So should we let our software do the same thing? Should we allow AI to evolve its dialects for specific tasks that involve speaking to other AIs? To essentially gossip out of our earshot? Maybe; it offers us the possibility of a more interoperable world, a more perfect place where iPhones talk to refrigerators that talk to your car without a second thought.
The tradeoff is that we, as humanity, would have no clue what those machines were actually saying to one another.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it
[Reminds me of]: Voynich Manuscript
What are your thoughts on this topic?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 16 2017, @10:34PM (1 child)
"Colossus: The Forbin Project [wikipedia.org]" both in book and movie form - shows to computers (AI) of the day going to full mathematical language - then took over the world.
"The Adolescence of P-1 [wikipedia.org]" just 1 program spreading as virus though interconnected machine until singularity. Then others trying to figure out what is being said on the interconnects.
Just naming two. It is not good when to locations can take privately even in full light of the day... Just ask NSA, FBI, MI5, MI6, ...
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday July 17 2017, @01:21AM
You're the first person I recall meeting who had also read it! Granted, the story glossed over a few things, but it presage the Morris Worm by quite a few years. I especially liked the part of the story where
I'll grant you that I was very early in learning programming, so I was probably much more forgiving about the story then, than I would be now, but still many fond memories about reading that story. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Wit is intellect, dancing.