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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 16 2017, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
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?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday July 17 2017, @01:20AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 17 2017, @01:20AM (#540107) Journal

    1. Start with C++ - who the hell can understand the hellish meta-programming constructs involved in ellipsis expansion. What the hell "Variadic are funadic" [youtube.com] can even mean?... and this 5 years ago!! I tell yea, Alexandrescu is a terrorist!

    2. Continue with the mathematicians. They are the root of all evil, they listen to commendable laws, but laws going against the law of the Australian government [zdnet.com] - this has to stop, the laws of Australia trump the laws of mathematics**, GCHQ gave us assurances.
    (and don't get me started with those laws of thermodynamics again, I might be tempted to impose most draconian punishments against anyone who invoke them to deny supraunity efficiency - we may even get far enough to demonstrate its only the lack of political will in Australian politics we are still in this deplorable situation in regards with energy reserves and prices).

    3. Then ban science in general - they do tend to come with those wild theories of theirs, befuddling the simple minds with terminology no human mind can naturally understand. After all, my faith is as good as your science (if in doubt, see point 2).

    4. finally, declare illegal any language other than English. The effort involved in translation, for example, from/to Russian or Chinese is impeding the free flow of command - how can those two nations be expected to obey if they don't understand the orders from their superiors.

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    ** Yes, you can use the linked as a story submission

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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