laitimes

Gaming and technology are inseparable

author:China Economic Net

Source: Economic Daily

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be one of the technologies that has had a profound impact on human society in the past two or three decades. Many industry experts believe that as a branch of computer science, artificial intelligence has strong scientific exploration attributes. Based on the "common divisor" of algorithms, games and technology have become two important driving forces for the development of artificial intelligence, and together form the "double helix structure" of scientific exploration.

Looking back at the milestones since the birth of artificial intelligence, we will find that what experts say is true. From the AI "Deep Blue" victory over chess world champion Kasparov in 1997, to AlphaGo's defeat of Go world champion Lee Sedol in the Go man-machine battle in 2016, to the birth of ChatGPT in 2022, the two keywords of games and technology have never been absent.

Many people may not know that the world's first video game was invented by a nuclear physicist named William Higginbotham. Higgin Botham participated in the famous Manhattan Project, the U.S. War Department's program to develop the atomic bomb, during World War II.

In 1958, Higgin Botham headed the Instruments Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States, working on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The laboratory has a 3-day public open house every year. Previous open houses have used static displays with little effect. To spark public interest in nuclear physics, Higgin Botham came up with games. He used a ballistic missile trajectory calculation system to create a video game called "Two-Man Tennis." Players can manipulate the dots on the screen via buttons on the controller to jump back and forth on the simulated tennis court. The game was a huge success, attracting hundreds of people lining up on the day of the open day.

If video games were created by science to interact with the public, the next story becomes a "double-master" large-scale drama scene between science and games.

In May 2008, a protein folding game called Foldit was officially put in beta. In less than two years, this alternative game project managed to attract more than 240,000 registered players.

The idea for the game came from David Baker, a biologist at the University of Washington.

Professor Baker specializes in molecular biology, with a specific focus on protein structure. Proteins are made up of amino acids, but there are countless possibilities for the specific structure and folding of amino acids, and researchers need to find the right way to fold from these countless possibilities. This amount of work is simply too great for a research team to work overtime. So Professor Baker turned to an associate professor of computer science at the same university. With the help of the latter team, the protein-folding game Foldit was born.

It turns out that the masters are in the folk. The player's protein folding results far exceeded the molecular biologists' expectations. In 2011, Foldit players helped decipher the folding structure of an AIDS retroviral protease, a scientific puzzle that experts have been working on for 15 years. What's even more amazing is that this Foldit player took only 10 days.

The same thing happened in the astronomy world. The daily observational data produced by astronomical telescopes is extremely staggering, and early image recognition technology is not detailed enough, and much of the content needs to be recognized with the naked eye. To that end, Chris Lintot, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, has launched a website, called Galaxy Zoo, to attract the public to gamify it to help astronomers identify distant galaxies. As a result, players were able to beat a series of important science "quests".

Later, Galaxy Zoo further developed into Zooniverse, becoming the world's largest crowdsourcing platform for science games across multiple disciplines. Here players can "count" the number of Weddell seals in a certain area of Antarctica, look for small lizards on cliffs, determine the location of mitochondria in cells, and contribute to scientific endeavors while playing games.

Artificial intelligence is essentially a "romantic encounter" between science and games. This is because artificial intelligence needs to simulate human thinking for technological innovation, and games are precisely an experimental scenario with relatively low cost and relatively small difficulty to promote. In the field of games, in order to pursue clearer visualizations, smoother interactive experiences, faster running speeds and more vivid game characters, people continue to put forward new requirements for artificial intelligence from theoretical, technical and even ethical levels, which is also the biggest driving force for the continuous development of artificial intelligence.

As early as 1950, Turing, known as the "father of artificial intelligence", mentioned the relationship between artificial intelligence research and games in a paper called "Computer Machines and Intelligence", believing that board games are an important field to demonstrate the "thinking" ability of machines. In this paper, Turing proposed the most famous test program in the field, the Turing test. In a sense, the Turing test is a scientific experiment script in the form of a game, and its core content is how to make artificial intelligence successfully "fool" human examiners, so that human examiners mistakenly believe that the artificial intelligence behind the test scene is humans.

At present, it is widely believed that the next AI milestone may be born in complex strategy games. In the future, when artificial intelligence learns to perceive, understand, reason, decide, act and interact in real time like humans, it will inevitably play a greater role in the complex and changeable real environment.

Interestingly, games have long since moved beyond the traditional entertainment field and begun to extend their tentacles to all aspects of economic and social development. For example, in 2020, the game "Endeavor Prescription" developed by Akili Interactive was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a digital new drug, officially used in the clinical treatment of attention deficit and cognitive impairment in children. In 2022, Tencent AI Lab and the "Honor of Kings" game team jointly developed an artificial intelligence open research platform - Enlightenment, which has become one of the few open algorithm platforms in China to study multi-agent games. Games are pushing boundaries, incubating cutting-edge technologies that are more competitive and closer to real-world applications.

From today's point of view, the "entanglement" between games and technology is so deep that it has reached the point of inseparability. This kind of "hardcore" romance may be the legendary "mutual achievement". (Source: Economic Daily Author: Jiang Ziyang)

Read on