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generic AI

You'd be forgiven for finding little infrequent about the latest defeat of an arsenal of poker champions by the computer algorithm Libratus in Pittsburgh last week. After all, in the last decade or two, computers have fabricated a habit of crushing lath game heroes. And at start blush, this appears to be only another iteration in that all-as well-familiar story. Peel dorsum a layer though, and the most recent AI victory is every bit disturbing as it is compelling. Permit's explore the compelling side of the equation before excavation into the disturbing implications of the Libratus victory.

By now, many of us are familiar with the thought of AI helping out in healthcare. For the final twelvemonth or so IBM has been bludgeoning us with TV commercials about its Jeopardy-winning Watson platform, at present being put to use to assistance oncologists diagnose and care for cancer. And while I wish to take nothing abroad from that accomplishment, Watson is a question answering system with no capacity for strategic thinking. The latter topic belongs to a form of situations more germane to the field of game theory. Game theory is unremarkably tucked under the sub-genre of economic science, for it deals with how entities make strategic decisions in the pursuit of self interest. Information technology's also the subject area from which the AI poker playing algorithm Libratus gets its smarts.

What does this take to do with health intendance and the flu? Think of disease as a game between strategic entities. Movie a virus as one player, a player with a certain gear up of set on and defense strategies. When the virus encounters your trunk, a game ensues, in which your body defends with its own strategies and hopefully prevails. This game has been going on a long time, with humans having only a marginal power to control the outcome. Our body's natural defenses have been developed in evolutionary time, and thus have a express ability to make on the fly adaptations.

But what if we could recruit computers to exist our allies in this game confronting viruses? And what if the same reasoning ability that allowed Libratus to prevail over the best poker minds in the world could tackle how to defeat a virus or a bacterial infection? This is in fact the subject area of a compelling research newspaper by Toumas Sandholm, the designer of the Libratus algorithm. In it, he explains at length how an AI algorithm could be used for drug design and disease prevention.

With only the health of the entire human being race at pale, it'due south hard to imagine a rationale that would discourage united states of america from making use of such a strategic superpower. Now for the disturbing part of story, and the so-called fable of the sparrows recounted by Nick Bostrom in his atypical piece of work Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies. In the preface to the volume, he tells of a group of sparrows who recruit a baby owl to help defend them confronting other predators, not realizing the owl might one mean solar day grow upwards and devour them all. In Libratus, an algorithm that's in essence a universal strategic game-playing auto, and is probable capable of besting humankind in any number of existent-world strategic games, we may have finally met our owl. And while the stop of the story between ourselves and Libratus has withal to be determined, prudence would surely propose we tread carefully.