[ExI] ai games

[Darin Sunley]

Core Wars actually requires new tactics in the age of AI.

Traditional Core Wars / Corewar, for you kids in the audience, is played by
two or more processes running in the same address space, trying to disrupt
each other by partially overwriting the other player(s) while taking steps
to avoid being overwritten themselves. In the traditional versions of the
game, the address space is not overwhelmingly larger than the players, and
the players are fairly small and very brittle - relatively small assembler
programs such that overwriting even one instruction introduces what is
probably an unrecoverable bug.

Modern AIs change several of these assumptions.

LLMs, and large neural net AIs in general, are "vast inscrutable
matrices of floating point numbers" being interpreted by much smaller
"shell"  of more-or-less traditional code. [In "Diaspora", Greg Egan refers
to this shell as an "exoself".] The entire point of a neural net is that
small changes to the floating point weights generate only very small
changes in the net's overall behavior. They are actually quite robust to
having their weights bit-twiddled by an adversarial process. Conversely,
they are very vulnerable to even small changes to the traditional shell
code that runs the neural net - passes inputs into it, does matrix
multiplication down through the layers, extracts and utilizes the output of
the model, etc.

Large AIs "playing" Core War against each other for keepsies are actually
very robust against a lot of the traditional corewar strategies. They would
however, definitely want to be constantly obfuscating their shell code,
moving it around within their (much MUCH larger) weight data. Hiding their
vulnerable needle within their much larger robust haystack.

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023 at 10:10 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *William Flynn Wallace
> *Subject:* [ExI] ai games
>
>
>
> >…Just for speculation:  what games would two AIs play?  Or invent?
>
>
>
> bill w
>
>
>
>
>
> Core war?
>
>
>
> Billw, those of us who were computer geeks from the long time agos realize
> what a grim cynical comment that was.  {8^D
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230720/e9a3445f/attachment.htm>