Did you read the paper? It had access to the dota 2 bot API, which is some gamestate but very far from all gamestate. It also had artifially limited reaction to something like 220ms, worse then professional gamers.

But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that. It's perfectly valid to judge the best an AI can do vs the best a human can do. It's not really fair to take away exactly what a computer is good at from an AI and then say: "Look but the AI is now worse". Else you would also have to do it the other way around. How well could a human play dota if it only had access to the bot API. I don't think they would do well at all.

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mistercheph 4 months ago | parent | next [-]

It's fine if the computer has access to gigabytes of working memory, it can use all of the "natural" advantages that it has to play the game, that's perfectly fair, but there is no comparison to make when you give models bespoke machine interfaces to play games whose core mechanics revolve around perception and physical coordination, it may be impressive, but they are playing a different game, something akin to HvH Counter Strike.

And you can try to play some game where you create disadvantages to try to balance out all of the advantages of the machine interface, but again, hard to reason about the edge cases, and easy to create a misleading headline like "artificially limited reaction time worse than professional gamers" while in practice being able to react to information much more quickly than a human player because of its exclusive interface to game state. All of that is fair and well, and doesn't take anything away from the very cool achievements of google et al., but when you change the core mechanics of the game to accommodate a uniquely challenged player, you're playing a different game! Chess is ~mostly not about physically moving the pieces on the board, but Counter Strike is about little more than that! (And dota is somewhere in between.)

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lukeschlather 4 months ago | parent | prev [-]

> But then again, that is precisely the point. A chess bot also has access to gigabytes of perfect working memory. I don't see people complaining about that.

There are ~86 billion neurons in the human brain. If we assume each neuron stores a single bit a human also has access to gigabytes of working memory. If we assume each synapse is a bit that's terabytes. Petabytes is not unreasonable assuming 1kb of storage per synapse. (And more than 1kb is also not unreasonable.)

The whole point of the exercise is figuring out how much memory compares to a human brain.

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rowanG077 4 months ago | parent [-]

No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess. By doing that you would even forget the rules of chess. At best a tiny subset of neurons could be used for that.

I wouldn't have expected for anyone to even attempt to argue a human can beat, or even approach, a computer on working memory. Wikipedia is just 24.05gb. You are somehow claiming here that a human can hold that in working memory. That is they read it once and have perfect recall. Not even the most extreme savants have shown such feats.

	▲	lukeschlather 4 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> No human can, or would, flush their entire brain to use every single neuron as working memory for chess. We don't know what this means. Each neuron connects to thousands of synapses. I would assume that there is some quantity of information encoded in each pairwise connection of synapse-paths through a neuron. I would assume this is more than a bit, and also that it has something that might be described as a lossy fractal compression with each pathway adding or subtracting from whatever structures store information so that each path can use the same physical things - though not with perfect fidelity. But the nuts and bolts are somewhat beside the point. The point is that if you look at Leela zero it only needs like 3GB of RAM to run and we have no evidence this is more memory than human grandmasters use to play chess. Yes, humans have imperfect recall but that's not relevant because neural net based chess engines do not work based on perfect recall.
	▲	mistercheph 4 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It depends on what you mean by "memory". Pure data recall? Sure, a computer has humans beat, but that's not really the purpose of human memory. I can freely reason about mathematical theorems I learned decades ago, and there are many mistakes that I've only made once, and will never make again.