Pei,
You are using "play" in a narrow sense to denote a certain kind of activity
. Bob is using it in a broader sense to denote a mode of activity.
Humans can be seen, in Bob's sense, as playing all their many, very
different kinds of activities. Somewhat along these lines, Herb Gintis has
argued that all human behaviour can be treated from a games perspective - &
that games theory provides a unifying framework for the behavioral sciences.
I broadly agree and would take this much further, arguing that all human
activities - work, sex, conversations, thinking, playing formal games/
sports etc - can be treated as games which people "play". (Gintis tends to
think in narrower terms about relatively simple exchanges of at most a few
moves between individuals, whereas I am concerned with the entire complex
sequences of action - or series of "moves" - that humans and animals perform
in conducting whole activities).
"Playing" a game is to be contrasted with "executing" a program. Play is a
free-form choice of moves, programmed action is a fixed-form choice of
moves.
When humans play any formal game or indeed any activity, they have at each
stage a range of possible moves open to them - and within that, a much
smaller but still significant range of possible moves which are actually
reasonable (most aren't). What distinguishes play is that agents can choose
ANY of those moves in any order - whereas, of course, an agent executing a
program can only choose a given move and a given series of moves in a given
order - a precise "program of action." When humans play even a relatively
tight, formal game like chess, they do still "play" it in this technical
sense - for they simply do not have the computational resources to consider
trillions of moves a second and narrow the range of possible moves down to
one (assuming that IS computationally possible - and for most human
activities it isn't, period). They do still at each stage, typically, have
various reasonable moves open to them - and they do play them in a more or
less free-form way, rarely if ever conforming tightly to any precise plan or
program.
Of course, the KINDS of activity that are denoted as pure "play" in your
sense - kids playing doctors and nurses, someone improvising a series of
notes on a piano, or a freestyle dance, or doodling a pattern or drawing a
scene on a page - exhibit what I have technically, modally defined as play
in a much more exaggerated, flamboyant way than the most formal games, such
as chess and checkers. In pure play, the player can and may extensively
invent moves as well as freely combining them. Nevertheless, there is an
unbroken continuum in both human and animal activities between the most
formal games and activities, where moves are tightly defined, to those forms
of play where moves are very loosely and sometimes not at all defined. (Even
in the most formal activities, a certain amount of invention and
innovation/improvisation is called for from each player).
If humans and animals really do play their activities as I suggest, then
that forms the most fundamental challenge of all to cog sci and current
AGI - and no AGI that is incapable of play will succeed. AFAIK no AGI can
yet play - Bob is right.
I will try and put all this in a much more apposite form in the next week or
two.
P.S. Another way of saying what I have just expressed, is that human
activities vary from games to art forms - and are mixtures to varying
degrees of both. Life is indeed also an art. And no AGI that is not an
artist (like your good self) will succeed.
Pei: : As far as this discussion is concerned, "play" is an activity a
system
carries for its own sake, rather than as means to other ends. As a
by-product, play always serves as an exercise for the relevant skills,
as well as provides certain information about the environment (so it
is indeed rewarded by evolution), but as soon as the system carries
out the activity with those goals in mind, it is not playing anymore
--- "play" must be "for fun", not "for money", "for career", etc.
Even though the advantages of playing can be justified, there is also
an obvious cost --- the time/energy/resources used in the activity.
That is one reason why few people can justify their research if the
goal is to design a system that can play but do nothing else. Also, an
activity is called "play" only when it is irrelevant to the primary
goal of the system, so Deep Blue is not "playing" in this sense when
it plays chess.
For AGI, to be able to "play", in the above sense, is not only
necessary, but also possible, even inevitable. For a system with
insufficient knowledge and resources, goal derivation always leads to
"alienation", in the sense that what start as means become ends. If I
have a goal A, and I belief it can be achieved by achieving B first,
I'll take B as my goal, and begin to get internal reward from progress
towards it. In the long run, B may turn out to be irrelevant and even
opposite to A, though I have no way to completely and absolutely rule
out this possibility at the beginning. The same is true for an AI
system --- as far as the goal derivation process is based on
insufficient knowledge and resources, eventually the system will have
many derived goals that do not really serve the initial or original
goals from which they are derived. When pursuing these derived goals,
the system is, more or less, playing, because it is rewarded (or gets
pleasure) from these activities themselves, rather than using them to
achieving other goals.
The goal derivation mechanism in NARS already works in this way. See
my publications (http://nars.wang.googlepages.com/) for more details.
> Bob Mottram wrote:
As far as I know there aren't any AI systems which "play" in a proper
sense.
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