Pardon me if I'm really ignorant of the AI field here, but doesn't this look like the beginning of more general artificial intelligence? The organic feel of some of these moves is almost scary to me.
What exactly does "time travel" mean in this context? That the simulation makes some moves, sees what happened, and then has the ability to undo its moves and go back to its old state, and then try new moves?
When a baseball player swings a bat, in anticipation of the ball arriving just in time to get knocked out of the park, do you consider that time travel?
Is the baseball player's anticipation of the future really all that different from what this program is doing?
I think the difference is that the computer can try the input and record the result and then try again. The baseball player can't have a redo of that pitch if they miss or if it's a foul.
I don't really see how it's time travel but that's what he called it.
the program fails repeatedly and then loads a previous state to try a different move, what you see is the result of multiple trials. it can't reliably get it right on the first try.
Neither can a baseball player. He's been practicing since age 3 to hit that ball.
Is a decade or two of baseball practice really all that different from a computer playing and re-playing the game over and over looking for optimal strategy?
Genetic algorithms (and variants) can pick up some very interesting patterns for achieving the target fitness. I don't think this is necessarily anything new, and GAs have their limitations, but applying them to multiple NES games is impressive. I'm convinced that GAs will be an important part of future computing.
The scary thing is artificial intelligence isn't about incredibly complex systems, like you would assume. It uses some rather simple algorithms, which are often not unlike (or modelled) on things in real life. We are no where near close to a proper intelligence, we just have a bunch of algorithms that 'seem' intelligent. AI is mostly about pattern matching.
