The Reason Behind AI's Victory Over Humans in Games Is Actually Biology

Back in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov, marking the first time a machine had beaten a world champion in a match. By the early to mid-2000s, the technology had advanced to the point where machines were consistently beating grandmasters in nearly every variation of chess.

So computer scientists turned their attention to Go, an ancient strategy game from China that is very easy to learn but difficult to master.

A research team at Carnegie Mellon University held a more public event in January 2017, when its Libratus AI system spent 20 days playing 120,000 rounds of no-limit Texas Hold’em against four professional poker players.

After nearly a month of nonstop play, the machine had won a total of $1.7 million, while each of the four professionals lost thousands of dollars in play money.

In May 2017, AlphaGo Master defeated Ke Jie, the world’s top-ranked Go player. In the three games AlphaGo and Ke Jie played against each other, the machine was always in the lead.

By December 2017, DeepMind had unveiled a more advanced version of its system. Called AlphaZero, the new AI could master multiple games in a matter of hours. It was so IMBA.

Among these games, it is undeniable that Dota2 is one of the most difficult and strategically complex games. Most of the time, players are faced with the need to explore the game.

So the first thing we need to solve is the character's navigation problem. At this time, we need to invite biologists to explain how the human brain navigates.

Exploring the mysteries of the human brain can be said to be a task with a difficulty coefficient of more than 9.9, but Deepmind, standing on the shoulders of giants, found the answer to the question effortlessly. Special thanks to John O'Keefe, the British-American scientist who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and May-Britt from Norway and her husband Edvard Moser.

Through unremitting efforts and untold hardships, they foundThe core of human brain GPS - "grid unit", which allowed Deepmind to easily discover the key to the human brain's spatial perception. Grid cells are a type of neuronal organization composed of countless grid cells, whose main function is to help humans and most mammals locate and navigate themselves.

When we move, the grid cells will constantly update the current location and surrounding environment, record the walking path and historical location, and then draw a virtual map in the brain to help the brain determine the location and direction.

Every time you go to a new place, the grid cells will automatically draw a new map. That is to say, the more places you go, the more complete the map will be, and the wider your spatial perception range will be.

Inspired by this achievement, the Deepmind team worked with UCL (University College London) scientists to develop a recursive neural network system. In simulating the process of mice finding directions, the system miraculously discovered that the neural network produced some features similar to those of grid cells when determining positions.

(Note: The grid cells generated by the neural network are very similar to humans)

Through further research and improvement, they successfully created a neural network version of the grid unit (also called AI grid unit). The AI grid unit can not only determine its own position, but also find the best route to the target point in a complex environment.

The Deepmind team was overjoyed by this discovery, and they urgently needed an opportunity to show off their real technology. Therefore, the team decided to skip mice and gorillas and declare war directly on humans.

In a maze game against professional players, the AI equipped with a neural network version of grid units not only found the direction in the complex environment, but also accurately calculated the distance to the target point and found the fastest route (including some other routes that took a longer time), successfully defeating humans.

Although it was only a victory in a virtual environment, it means that AI has the ability to find its way in real scenes without the help of external data such as GPS. Therefore, while Deep Mind has been successful, it is undeniable that this is a milestone victory.

Previously, AI has only been proven to excel in areas such as image recognition and board games, but rarely has it surpassed humans in subjective cognitive areas such as navigation. This time, AI has "evolved" into an automatic navigation function, proving that AI can not only replicate the brain, but also understand it well.

It is foreseeable that AI will have more possibilities in the future. Relying on its powerful computing and learning capabilities, it can come up with several solutions to the same problem and find the best answer.

As for games, if we continue to train AI to adapt to various game environments, and then add the Google Assistant's voice that is difficult to distinguish between real and fake.

We are afraid that it will be even more difficult to distinguish whether the game player on the opposite side is a young lady or AI.

So Sad.

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