Is there anything that comes close to the CM games?

[BletchleyGeek]

Okay, you actually helped me to parse a sentence of the manual that has beaten me for years - as anybody can see there's no mention of having to press the LMB at the same time as the Shift or Alt key.

 

 

[Rattenkrieg]

37 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

So zero actual answers, zero references to papers or actual demostrations, just more e-peen swinging and accusations of being butt hurt about something (actually, some of the general algorithms I have worked on for the ATARI games haven't been beaten yet by any of the neural stuff)

 

37 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Unbounded levels of aggro and ****ty attitudes are more often found on the Internet than in real life.

 

10 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

I have no idea what is Palantir trying to pitch but it sounds to me as pure bull**** tbh.

It's amusing to watch you contradict yourself.

 

38 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

I was talking about AlphaZero

You mentioned Alpha then immediately how AlphaGo was trained by humans and absolutely no mention of AlphaGo Zero. How am I to take you seriously?

--- space reserved for when I have more time --

[BletchleyGeek]

1 minute ago, Rattenkrieg said:

 was trained by humans and absolutely no mention of AlphaGo Zero. How am I to take you seriously?

This sentence proves that you just didn't understand anything of what I wrote initially, or that you know much or anything about how to apply deep learning to any practical problem from scratch, or you have read any of the papers. AlphaZero was initially demonstrated on the game of Go, and then Deepmind  renamed the approach as Alpha or AlphaX where X is the name of the game they have deployed the same algorithm and changing the model of the game rules and states. The "zero" comes from not using games with humans for bootstrapping, which have zero to do with all the other questions I raised, which are all design choices made by humans.

Don't bother coming back. Save your time for productive endeavours. 

[Rattenkrieg]

10 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

I have no idea what is Palantir trying to pitch but it sounds to me as pure bull**** tbh.

Makes outlandish, arrogant and boastful claim with zero evidence to back it up. Pops smoke. Retreats.

[Rattenkrieg]

41 minutes ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Okay, you actually helped me to parse a sentence of the manual that has beaten me for years - as anybody can see there's no mention of having to press the LMB at the same time as the Shift or Alt key.

 

 

I do find it remarkable how incurious a researcher you appear to be. How could this have "beaten" you for 8 years and yet I figured it out so quickly? The [LMB] is used to "select" in all cases. So presumably [Alt] and [Shift] are modifiers of the "select" action. I had the manual open and clicked on everything on every page. I must be a machine.

You couldn't figure this out or research it on the forums.

[BletchleyGeek]

For the benefit of other readers interested on what it takes to reproduce the success of the Alpha algorithms it is useful to consider that Deepmind reported to beat Stockfish, a state-of-the-art automated chess player which has been developed for ten years, in just four hours (link to paper). That's impressive but it is also useful to remember that during those 4 hours, AlphaZero was trained 

Quote

using 5,000 first-generation TPUs to generate self-play games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks

quoting from the paper. A distributed, open-source effort to replicate those results against Stockfish took over a year, painstakingly following Deepmind approach

https://en.chessbase.com/post/leela-chess-zero-alphazero-for-the-pc

and they released it as a plugin for Fritz. Having a beefy GPU for computing the opponent moves is highly recommended.

[A Canadian Cat]

11 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Just some notes on the above, as a member of the research community, I feel I need to comment on this briefly.

That was an awesome post. Thanks for the background info and the links to references. My AI knowledge is from listening to and reading podcasts of interviews with technology inventors and practitioners and interacting with the group in my company that are working on integrating some machine learning into our product line. It is very interesting to see how things are progressing from the expert systems that I started working on using Fortran back in my university days. Also, very predictable that the latest work builds upon the previous work - duh

As a side note there is a clear difference in reading your well thought out charitable arguments on the subject. References certainly help solidify your posts.

[BletchleyGeek]

Cheers @IanL, happy to hear someone found the discussion interesting. 

9 minutes ago, IanL said:

interacting with the group in my company that are working on integrating some machine learning into our product line.

The technology is there, and in a very useable state - much more than it ever was in the late 1980s and 1990s when first wave of neural networks practical algorithms and applications came up. Here's another paper you may appreciate reading (and sorry if I am making too many assumptions about your background:

https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5656-hidden-technical-debt-in-machine-learning-systems.pdf

Quote

Machine learning offers a fantastically powerful toolkit for building useful complex prediction systems quickly. This paper argues it is dangerous to think of these quick wins as coming for free. Using the software engineering framework of technical debt, we find it is common to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs in real-world ML systems. We explore several ML-specific risk factors to account for in system design. These include boundary erosion, entanglement, hidden feedback loops, undeclared consumers, data dependencies, configuration issues, changes in the external world, and a variety of system-level anti-patterns.

 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

TBH you guys lost me at 'algorithm'. 

[Rattenkrieg]

It's all well and good to post links to papers (just FYI the majority of the most interesting papers published on AI in 2018-9 are in Mandarin).

I'm still waiting for @BletchleyGeek to back up his claim that Palantir ($800 million contract to build a DeepLearning based warfighting system for the US Army) is full of "pure bull****". How anyone can make a ludicrous claim like that and get away with it speaks volumes.

[A Canadian Cat]

1 hour ago, BletchleyGeek said:

The technology is there, and in a very useable state - much more than it ever was in the late 1980s and 1990s when first wave of neural networks practical algorithms and applications came up. Here's another paper you may appreciate reading (and sorry if I am making too many assumptions about your background:

https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5656-hidden-technical-debt-in-machine-learning-systems.pdf

That is for sure. The expert systems I worked with were basically us humans coding a decision tree as close to how we formally analyzed a problem ourselves. Clearly they were helpful and frequently useful but limited to the conditions and categories we considered. For safety reasons (engineering applictions after all) we really were limiting ourselves to the starting point for analysis. Kind of like a qualifying questionnaire that lead to the right people further examining the problem with a good starting point.

Now we are training something way more sophisticated with reference material and letting it loose on totally unknown documents to get a result (not the same problem space and no safety concerns and engineering involved). Even then we have learned that *we* are not able to train the system and ship the resulting algorithm to customers because there is enough of a difference between various companies material that we aren't getting the results they want. Instead we have created a tool set that lets our customer train the system on their data and incorporate the resulting model into our product. We are hoping that with some more experience and some partnerships we can create a number of models that work in various similar businesses.

Amazing advances and such a large amount of effort being applied - both in creating the advances and in the application to the real world.

[A Canadian Cat]

53 minutes ago, Rattenkrieg said:

I'm still waiting for @BletchleyGeek to back up his claim that Palantir ($800 million contract to build a DeepLearning based warfighting system for the US Army) is full of "pure bull****". How anyone can make a ludicrous claim like that and get away with it speaks volumes.

LOL well that was pretty bold of him - true   But dude, that was one point in his analysis of how you were overstepping how the technology could be applied. So, even if us readers grant you that he was wrong about that line, it is hardly vindication of your point and the end of his.

[sburke]

both you guys need to tone it down a notch.  You obviously have some major disagreements, but jeez cut the name calling and stuff.  It would make for a far more interesting exchange for the rest of us if you weren't  treating each other like 12 year olds.  Or adult total nerds.   Algo.. Algor... Al gore rhythm?  What was that word @Sgt.Squarehead?

[A Canadian Cat]

55 minutes ago, sburke said:

Algo.. Algor... Al gore rhythm?  What was that word @Sgt.Squarehead?

LOL what ever it is I hear Al Gore invented it

[A Canadian Cat]

56 minutes ago, sburke said:

but jeez cut the name calling and stuff.

"He hit me back first!"

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Climate Change? 

[BletchleyGeek]

3 hours ago, IanL said:

LOL well that was pretty bold of him - true   But dude, that was one point in his analysis of how you were overstepping how the technology could be applied. So, even if us readers grant you that he was wrong about that line, it is hardly vindication of your point and the end of his.

There is a big difference between gaining a contract and delivering a product that works as expected. It also does not seem to be claiming to provide what Mr. Rattenkrieg says it does, or definitely not one of the main deliverables.

2 hours ago, sburke said:

both you guys need to tone it down a notch.  You obviously have some major disagreements, but jeez cut the name calling and stuff.  It would make for a far more interesting exchange for the rest of us if you weren't  treating each other like 12 year olds.  Or adult total nerds

Somebody just pulled out the technical card on another forum member, and made arguments and claims which seemed to me to be both misinformed and hyperbolic. I pointed to this person how those claims were at odds with the facts. Here I am wearing my scientist hat, not my BletchleyGeek the forum member, as I think it is my civic duty to contest claims that I perceive to misinform the public.

As usual on the Internet, this person just run to the top of the hill ready to die on it while refusing to engage, not actually answering any arguments or providing any reference. That is a waste of time and a dissapointment, as the discussion went onto technical details. I respected him enough to present some substantial arguments to discuss, and being way more  intellectually generous than him.

Thanks very much for calling me a 12 year old and a nerd... how is that supposed to be helpful? I do not suffer fools gladly when talking shop, and if you couldn't follow the discussion I am sorry you felt left out and excluded, but there are limits to the amount of time one can put into being didactical. 

[sburke]

5 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Thanks very much for calling me a 12 year old and a nerd... how is that supposed to be helpful? I do not suffer fools gladly when talking shop, and if you couldn't follow the discussion I am sorry you felt left out and excluded, but there are limits to the amount of time one can put into being didactical. 

Yeah I may have been a bit heavy handed and for that I am sorry.  No need to apologize for me being left out, that would be my problem not yours.  I was trying to get the back and forth to ratchet down a bit.  I would apologize for calling you a nerd... but that would be disingenuous.  As a nerd I recognize my fellow nerds.

And just because I love this cartoon

 

[BletchleyGeek]

Always a good cartoon to keep in mind @sburke. Thanks for that post, too

[Sgt.Squarehead]

Yup, that's a favourite of mine too. 

[Rattenkrieg]

17 hours ago, IanL said:

LOL well that was pretty bold of him - true   But dude, that was one point in his analysis of how you were overstepping how the technology could be applied. So, even if us readers grant you that he was wrong about that line, it is hardly vindication of your point and the end of his.

Well @IanL I use it as a litmus test. If you claim that, arguably, the world's leading AI defense contractor is "full of pure bull****" don't you think that a detailed set of reasonings is required to back up that statement? He lists a set of reasons as to why ML is, in general, difficult to apply to the dynamic complexities of combat, however when you make an outlandish claim that the established leader in battlefield AI (just ask Raytheon who lost to them) has completely fooled the Pentagon, that is akin to stating that you know exactly what the Pentagon put out an RFP for, what Palantir demonstrated, and why it was accepted. And that the entire thing is a ruse to defraud the US taxpayer.

That is an enormously arrogant and irresponsible claim, and perhaps it is lost on you and most other readers. 

Was I, in fact, "overstepping" when suggesting that the devs start to train NNs to test their capabilities by gathering data? You may say that if you don't understand the potential of DeepLearning. 

The problem seems to be that BletchleyGeek is an ML researcher (I doubt he is a DL researcher) with a cognitive bias - and the difference is not to be underestimated - and expects me to rebut his statements when in reality the burden of proof is on him to prove that Palantir (and by extension the US DoD and CENTCOM) are full of "pure bull****" in the context of AI for warfighting application.

The irony is that he then goes on to say just how amazing DeepLearning actually is, however nobody seems to notice the evolution in his position.

Edited August 21, 2019 by Rattenkrieg

[Rattenkrieg]

13 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

claims which seemed to me to be both misinformed and hyperbolic

You are an exercise in self-contradiction. I stated that the AI being developed by Palantir as part of their winning DSCG-A bid is "the closest thing I have seen so far" to AI and CV being able to generate autonomous battlefield C&C. You jumped on your high horse and started telling me how wood and trees does not equal forest.

You actually state that you have no idea what they are doing but that it is pure bull****. Have you any idea how silly that is?

Yet, by your logic, I'm misinformed and hyperbolic? 

This means you have no idea about - yet simultaneously understand and are up to date with- all of the below.

Palantir is eagerly awaiting your CV.

SPECIFICATIONS 

• ...
• Tactical Intelligence Ground Station (TGS): Tactical geo-intelligence PED and targeting node. TGS retains Common Ground Station capability and functionality; upgrades the hardware; adds more moving target identification (MTI), full motion video and imagery exploitation capability; and provides totally integrated stand-alone imagery, MTI and video sensor processing
• Geospatial Intelligence Work Station: Provides geospatial and imagery analysts within tactical and operational Army units the ability to process, view, exploit, transmit and store geospatial and imagery information via Army area communications from brigade to echelons above corps
• Operational Intelligence Ground Station: Consolidates the capabilities of the AN/TYQ-224A, GUARDRAIL Ground Baseline and the Tactical Exploitation System Forward
• Intelligence Processing Center: V1 provides a suite of core PED applications for intelligence analysis and storage. V2 is the basic combat training and division commander’s primary ISR networking; analysis, production system for tasking of sensors PED support

https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/iews-dcgs-a/

And the work of all of the following involved:

• Lockheed Martin (Denver, CO)
• General Dynamics (Scottsdale, AZ)
• ViaTech Systems, Inc. (Eatontown, NJ)
• Palantir (Palo Alto, CA)
• MITRE (Eatontown, NJ)
• Booz Allen Hamilton (Eatontown, NJ)
• Raytheon (Garland, TX; Arlington, VA)
• BAE Systems (Arlington, VA)
• NetApp (Sunnyvale, CA)
• VMware (Palo Alto, CA)
• Esri (Redlands, CA)
• Tucson Embedded Systems (Tucson, AZ)
• L3 Communication Systems (Tempe, AZ)
• Dell (Austin, TX)
• Potomac Fusion (Austin, TX)
• Redhat (Raleigh, NC)
• IBM (Armonk, NY)
• HP (Palo Alto, CA)
• Leidos (Reston, VA)
• ManTech (Fairfax, VA)
• Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA)
• Microsoft (Redmond, WA)

I have seen a demonstration of the following: moving target identification (MTI), full motion video and imagery exploitation capability; and provides totally integrated stand-alone imagery, MTI and video sensor processing.

As I stated in my OP, I work in the field of AI and Computer Vision. I fight Palantir on a weekly basis to stop them from headhunting my people. You work in the field of ML and are applying, in my opinion, myopic and narrow thinking in your knee-jerk reaction claim that no self-respecting AI specialist would make unless they were frustrated at being bypassed.

13 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Here I am wearing my scientist hat, not my BletchleyGeek the forum member, as I think it is my civic duty to contest claims that I perceive to misinform the public.

The completely unsubstantiated discrediting of a company perfectly fits your definition of a claim that misinforms the public. If you are, indeed, a scientist then it's even more shameful.

13 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Somebody just pulled out the technical card on another forum member

So that's what you call adding a disclaimer that explains why I object to the overuse of the term "AI"? 

Again, your logic is insane. You complain that the results of DL experiments such as AlphaZero are overhyped but you are fully OK with the overuse of the term AI to mean anything that is a rules-based decision making framework?

Reading your posts is truly a stultifying experience.

 

Edited August 21, 2019 by Rattenkrieg

[Rattenkrieg]

On 8/19/2019 at 4:12 PM, Rattenkrieg said:

I do not believe (but would be happy if it were the case that) either game designer collects vast amounts of gameplay data and supplements it with multiple camera angle footage of soldiers in combat, and layers the computer vision data from cameras mounted on AFVs from Syria (opponents need to shoot back) allowing a series of Neural Networks to process and construct autonomous tactical models. The closest I have seen AI in battlefield simulation is the work done by Palantir Technologies and the DCGS-A system they are co-developing.

The TL;DR version. My original statement above hypothesizes a future in which "vast amounts" of gameplay data and computer vision data derived from actual combat footage are processed by NNs to construct autonomous tactical models. It's a forward looking hypothesis of a direction in which wargaming AI may evolve, and something game developers should be encouraged to explore, because I can guarantee you that a day will come in the not-too-distant future where CGI does not mean models built by people. Having seen a Palantir demo in person (which I am sure naysayers will call a closed-loop hype demo based on bull****) of battlefield AI, I consider the convergence of these two fields to be simultaneously inevitable and exciting.

This is the kind of work I am involved in (we are a partner but I do not work for Nvidia). What you see in the video below is a world that is constructed by NNs (based on a Generative Network) using Unreal 4. Now just imagine a world where instead of people driving the car through the virtual world, it's an AV and the other cars on which the models were built are also AVs. What starts as pure research will have immensely impactful practical applications within the next 5-10 years in peacetime cities and on battlefields.

 

My first encounter with Computer Vision in business was with a hedge fund that rented several thousand apartments around the world. Each apartment overlooked a street with specific retail brands on it. In the window of each apartment were a multitude of video cameras that recorded every human that entered into and exited from each store. There were many thousands of cameras providing massive amounts of data and a highly accurate predictive model of the retail performance of each brand was derived from the CV data which included the size, colour and number of shopping bags that each identifiable shopper (anonymously tracked) emerged with, contrasted with their profile as they entered. It was also possible to track repeat shoppers even when they changed their clothes, headgear, hairstyles, etc. The hedge fund using this technology was able to consistently beat market predictions for the stock performance.

That was nearly 8 years ago. I have the privilege of working in a pretty cutting edge field and I encourage everyone out there to familiarize yourselves with what's coming.

Edited August 21, 2019 by Rattenkrieg

[Rattenkrieg]

p.s. just in case I am not posting enough Arxiv links to back up my computer generated street cred: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.06601.pdf

[A Canadian Cat]

12 hours ago, BletchleyGeek said:

Always a good cartoon to keep in mind @sburke. Thanks for that post, too

It very much is. But the flip side is that we should not just let propaganda or false claims or even questionable claims just sit out there without pointing out their flaws.

Please not I am speaking generally here. I am not calling anything in this thread propaganda or false but we all know we have seen that occasionally on this forum on other topics. So, while it is a bad idea to single handedly try to right the wrongs of the internet we also should not just turn our backs on everything either. We have to choose our battles and hope that all involved choose to be civil.