Writing a bot that plays Pac-Man is many things, but I wouldn't call it "scary". Especially considering the rules of Pac-Man had to be imperatively coded in relative detail [1], that some of the utilities were factored out into a basic reinforcement learning agent doesn't immediately convince me we've hit AGI at all.

Having to rely on playing an arcade game is a weak case in general. We don't call Counter-Strike modders AI researchers. The fear angle is nothing but woo, but I'd like to hear you elaborate nonetheless.

[1] https://github.com/moridinamael/mc-aixi/blob/master/src/pacm...

>Especially considering the rules of Pac-Man had to be imperatively coded in relative detail [1]

See, chessboards are meaningless outside of human experience. You only know how to play pac man without explicit instructions because you have a general concept of a game and what games look like when you win or lose them. Whenever you try to solve an AI problem in a narrow domain like this then you necessarily have to compensate by giving it a miniature model of the specific problem being solved.

Humans after all don't just intuitively know the rules of games before playing them. You also cannot just describe the rules of the game to the AI because the AI does not understand language.

I understand this. I'm also saying this is done pretty routinely in the video game industry from everything to the most basic pathfinding AI to more complex agents that factor in the terrain, particle effects and other aspects of the environment hardcoded into their processes to exhibit "intelligent" behavior, though typically only within that box. Game modders then engage in plenty of work from reverse engineering to what can realistically even be called AI programming.

MC-AIXI seems to be more generic because it factors this out into a reinforcement learner, but this in of itself is hardly a cause for fear and that AGI is coming, as the GP alluded. I'd wager today's AAA titles have some damned complicated heuristics of their own.

I thought by "scary" he meant "impressively efficient, since this ran on a desktop, while most ML algorithms take huge amounts of server space."