As you may have heard, Deep Mind's AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google has beaten one of the very best players in the world in the board game Go. Deep Mind won a 5 match series against Lee Sedol, 18 time world champion.
Go is a far more complicated game than chess. There are more possible board situations than atoms in the universe. A computer cannot calculate every possible outcome to determine its next move. Humans play Go with a combination of experience, analysis, and intuition. This was believed by many to be something computers could not do. Until now.
Lee Sedol was stunned at his first loss. He said Deep Mind made no mistakes, gave him no opening. By the fourth match he fought back and won. It was 3 to 1. He said he'd never received so many congratulations for winning a Go match. In the final match, Deep Mind made a big mistake early on, then the AI fought back to take the match and win the series 4 to 1.
Article here.
This gives us much to ponder.
One question, perhaps unconsequential but interesting anyway, is whether an AI could win the F1 Drivers Championship.
Here is how I would pose the question.
- The cars are built for human drivers, so require the AI to conform to that interface. It has to fit in the seat, push the pedals, turn the wheel, tap the paddles.
- It has to be self powered for the race duration and weigh as much as a human.
- It can receive only the sensory inputs that a human driver does. Visible light, sound, vibration, acceleration, add air pressure and smell if you wish. No LIDAR, no radar, no infrared, no GPS.
- It can have the same information and learning experiences that a human driver has. Practice drives on the tracks, practice in the same simulators the humans use, actual races against humans or against other versions of itself, starting with lower class cars- even karts, if you like - and working up to F1. No centimeter-scale track mapping uploaded to memory. During the race, information sent by the team to the AI can only be what a team could tell a human driver. Can't send the telemetry data from the car directly to the AI or anything like that.
- I would even consider restricting its raw reaction time and the speed at which it actuates the controls to human levels.
The point is not to see if a machine can beat an F1 car + human driver. The point is to see if an AI "brain" can beat a human brain. As much as possible, we'll make the machine (car), the physical body, the inputs and available data, all equal.
Can the AI, let's call it "Speed Racer", be the WDC?
What do you think? Why do you say that?
Is your answer influenced by whether the AI has a goal of self preservation (aka fear of death)? Should that matter?