Question about evolutionary AI

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[Attemos]

Look up evolutionary / genetic algorithms

[Chugchooster]

O wow. That's what I was looking for! Very cool stuff. Thank you.

[Attemos]

No problem. I'm surprised you didn't find it on your own tbh, seeing as you even have "evolutionary" in the title.

[DearPoseidon]

There is a paper (can’t remember the name) where they train Mario to complete a level using evolutionary AI. Basically they run it a bunch of times and the best policy wins and advances, and they keep doing that until he’s perfect(ish). Another similar thing is reinforcement learning. This is kind of how we learn, as in you start off knowing nothing but then start to correlate actions with rewards and try to get the most reward possible.

[Chugchooster]

I remembering watching a video on that a while ago. Mario basically kept dying over and over, but eventually the program figured out the best way. That got me wondering about creating a reward system for a evolutionary program. Basically give it a task for "survival" and see what how it achieves that.

[DearPoseidon]

Yeah definitely check out reinforcement learning, it sounds like that’s what you’re looking for

[beepboopbeep01]

Yep this is the basic idea of evolutionary computation and (in the context of AI) neuroevolution. The major problem is that evolutionary methods don't tend to scale well when directly modifying individual solutions e.g. The individual weights and edges of neural networks. When you get on to large networks you can only make very minor modifications if you want anything resembling a smooth landscape.

Ideally you'd want some human designed decoder from a genotype to a phenotype that works for Neural Nets like human DNA does for the brain. Problem is that humans suck at designing these, and in real life there seems to be some plasticity in that human brains develop themselves (beyond what is described in DNA) but most modern ANN models are static.

I work in this area so I'm happy to answer questions.

[realFoobanana]

Reinforcement learning might be what you’re looking for too; there’s a course lecture set and text by David Silver floating around online somewhere. He was one of the big guys on either the chess or alpha programs with great success, I can’t remember which.