Thursday, June 28, 2007

the game of life


Thinking Machine 4 created by Martin Wattenberg, with Marek Walczak, using Processing, explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

When it is your (White's) turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. in the left image below, you can see waves over the squares around the king and (very lightly) over the squares where the pawns might capture. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board; see image at right. The curves show potential moves--often several turns in the future--considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white.

3 comments:

t.nys said...

Mapping what we feel is the "right" or "wrong" move in life and scripting the potential chaos and order within the decision we make daily is a complicated process. One that i feel at this point AI can only achieve through games with official rules. Trying to input intelligence about human emotion into a computer program is on it's way [see conversation with d.thai in trans-architecture] but is not there yet...

So what can we at this point extract from human intelligence and game theory that could be applied to a program? This i feel is answered within the beginning stages of any game that is being created, series of tests among the majority demographic (1000 of people) to find out what do the users need/require/want ..[your basic programatic questions] but then the next step is critical, how will the users "use" your software, what's the interaction, and more importantly can these types of 'raw' and 'uncut' human emotion be simply mapped (as in your example)? can each person, with their own subjective views, play the game in the same way everytime? mapping varible predictions. maybe, if there were enough rules [see "Finite and Infinte Games by James p. Carse, a reading based on the philosophical look on how humans live their lives according to 'rules'] but more than likely everyone will react on there own instinct, experience, and knowledge no matter what the computer has mapped out for them or what the architect has created for the ideal settings. there is always the CHOICE, free will...you know

Try not focus on strict definition (as in such games as chess) to define such a varible lifestyle of a human being, but focus more on a definition that is flexible with time and evolution (similar to the Constitution, which remains strong to this day, sort of)

media comparison, just a funny thought: this conversation reminds me of the "jump to conclusions mat" from office space. in the end it will be up to the user, you (the designer) have to just layout the choices.

kbm2124 said...

there is no computer that will say what the next move WILL be, it will only express the possible moves pertaining to the situation at hand. no one can take away people's free will, and not only free will but creativity. there could be an outcome that no one has dreamed up yet. for example, not every game in chess has been played, and there are so many games possible that they all have not been documented.

wilson r. said...

Very well articulated comment Tim...

The discussion of free will to me is quite an interesting one because while you can argue that there is an infinite amount of games that can be played and that many have never happened yet, the outcome of each game is dependent on the each move which is dependent on all of the previous, and as a result, games such as chess are NOT a product of pure free will. You may make the first move by choice, but the rest happen because you HAVE to make them. It's irrelevant to see chess victories as a product of free will because as we have seen with the IBM Deep Blue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Deep_Blue)
computers do a much better job at finding all the possibilities and then beating us at our own game.

Games such as chess require skill and intelligence to process these possibilities, NOT to make the choice. In the end the choice is not what wins. It all depends on whether or not you can see the effect of making the choice.

Cause and effect.

I'm not one to romanticize the free will of humans because all of our actions are socialized and are always a product of many sources not limited to our own minds.

however, we are indeed a creative species. We make, we invent, we innovate. We learn how to live and then we learn how to do it better.

it can be argued that what makes us who we are is that we have free will and the ability to choose.

But! as it was brought up during our last meeting, who decides what the choices will be?

We believe we are expressing something about our individuality through what we wear, what we buy, what we do, but in reality we are merely choosing from a selection of choices that we have no power in deciding.

We have the ability to choose, but I would argue against the idea of the free will as something outside of our minds. We cannot make any choice we want, but we can definitely imagine.

The imaginative power of the human being is what makes us beautiful. Its the true creative piece of our minds. It may not always be a product of our individuality, but we can at least value this as a skill and understand that there are always a million things affecting our decisions.

I dont know how relevant this is to the conversation, but the issue of free will always fascinates me.

think about the matrix.. free will existed inside, but only as an illusion because they were all plugged in and had no real choice.

You can make any choices you want, but they are always a result of you being "plugged in"to to your social context.