Sunday, January 20, 2008

Week 1; New Media Issue

http://www.robotworldnews.com/100389.php

It bothers me more than a little bit that an AI can play Ms Pac Man better than I can. I felt slightly better after I read the whole article and realized that the researchers gave the AI a list of rules-- kind of like when one of my friends would share strategy for the games. Of course, when I played Ms Pac Man the most was in the days before home games systems (and the one we eventually got was an ATARI 2600, hardly a speed machine), so any strategy that I could get to make my quarter last longer was very welcome!

I completely do not understand the concept of "cross-entropy." For some reason, I though entropy had to do with stuff falling apart. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, entropy was what allowed the kipple to take over, wasn't it? Anyway, they article says:
As they explained, the basic idea of cross-entropy is that it selects the most successful actions, and modifies the distribution of actions to become more peaked around these selected actions.
So evidently entropy means something other than what I thought it meant. Attempting to understand what the term meant, I cruised over to wikipedia's entry. Wow, was that completely not helpful. Looks like I need to ask my programmer friend. Or my friend the physics prof. Because I cannot understand anything pertaining to a law of thermodynamics without an intermediary.

Since Ms Pac Man was never really a strength of mine, and since the AI has yet to figure out how to hang out next to a power pellet, lying in wait for the ghosts to close in, I should feel less bad? Maybe?

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