Tag: ai

Predicting Deception

a text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.

61% is not very useful (close to a coin toss), but it is an interesting start. of course, this research suffers from the usual problems (only 5 samples, wtf?), but given a few 100K samples, might be much more accurate.

Turing Gamebot

“The idea of the competition is to evaluate how we can make game bots, non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as possible. It is generally recognized that NPCs are relatively weak in most video games: their behavior is predictable and mechanical, and they often make mistakes that human players would be unlikely to make. Players often enjoy playing against other humans, because it provides a more interesting game experience. The goal of the competition is to promote more research in human-like bots, as well as evaluate how well we are currently doing in this area.”

Bot writers

all content on that site was written algorithmically.

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Amazon Marketplace Bots

more mundane singularity happenings:

There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

Computer Chess

  1. People enjoy watching a live internet human vs. human game more, when they can watch a computer judging the human moves and evaluating the position.
  2. Few people enjoy watching live computer vs. computer games, even though the quality of play is much higher and the likelihood of a complex, wild position is much higher. Even if you care at all, there is little in-progress suspense; you might as well look back at the moves once they are over. How many other activities would we enjoy watching or experiencing less if they were done by computers?
  3. The quality of play in a computer vs. computer game is so high it is often difficult for humans to tell where the losing computer went wrong, even if the spectator human has the help of a chess-playing computer.
  4. I find only the very best computer (Rybka) of interest, although I do not feel the same way about the human players. Furthermore the 5th best computer is still much better than the best human players.
  5. The notion of a computer chess tournament taking place “in time” is an odd one. You can play all the games back-to-back or simply use multiple copies of the programs and finish the entire tournament in a few hours; see #2.
  6. Watching a computer play chess is a window onto a world where, once the opening is past, there are many fewer presuppositions than what a human mind will bring to bear on the problem. It’s a very good way of learning, in convincing form, how much your intuitions lead you astray. It’s not just your “bad moves” which cause you to lose, it’s also the moves which still seem pretty good to you.
  7. There are nonetheless many computer moves which I simply cannot believe are any good. It does seem that every now and then computers get stuck in a “dogmatic trap,” usually because of their limited time horizons for evaluation. Playing against a computer, you will do best in the early middle game and then progressively fall apart as its combinatorial powers destroy you.

computer chess is now on such a high level that humans have difficulty analyzing the games.