Moving to ITU

I've just tendered my resignation at IDSIA.

The reason is that I've gotten a grant from the Danish Research Council for Technology and Production, allowing me to start working in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. I'll move on August 1st.

Writing this feels almost surreal, as I've been longing to move home for quite some time now. But this is not only about moving home. At least as important is that I'm moving from a world-class machine learning institute to a world-class games research group.

This closely mirrors the ongoing shift in the emphasis of my research efforts. I simply think that I have more good ideas within applications of computational intelligence methods to games and game design, than within the development of new computational intelligence methods themselves. Naturally, this has much to do with the former field being much younger and thus less exploited. More white spots on the map to fill in with bright colours.

So yes, I'm very happy right now.

How fun is Super Mario Bros?

Do you want to participate in some research? Please?

It's simple. Go to this address, play two levels of Super Mario Bros, and answer some questions about them. (Actually, it's not the "real" Super Mario game, but a customized version with some differences - you'll see!)

It's all part of a project that I'm involved in together with Chris Pedersen and Georgios Yannakakis at ITU. We're trying to investigate certain factors that affect entertainment in platform games and how to automatically optimize levels in such games. You'll hear about the results soon enough...

So, please play a game and contribute to science!

Machine learning might be too easy, but so what?

John Langford argues that machine learning is too easy. He doesn't specify exactly what he means by this, but it seems to be that it's possible to publish papers and make a career in one area of machine learning without even understanding the core ideas of other areas.

Apparently, he thinks this is a problem. But why?

I could agree that it would be a problem if we were talking about science here. But we aren't. I've long since stopped pretending that I do science. (Except for the remote possibility that something I do might have an impact on a real science, such as biology or psychology.) We are just not studying the natural world.

I don't think of it as engineering either, as an engineer is meant to construct that that actually work and make economic sense. Most of what I do is pretty far from being useful or even reliable. Instead I think of myself as an inventor, practicing blue-sky invention of algorithms and toy applications without direct economic pressure. (Role model: Gyro Gearloose.)

So in a field of invention where people are inventing things following different paradigms and variations on a common theme of learning/optimization, is it a problem that most of the inventors have only a very hazy idea of what the others are doing? Not necessarily, as we are not all working towards the same goal (at least in the near term) and don't need to agree on anything.

Of course, it's great when you can combine knowledge from different research fields and come up with a nice synthesis - this is an almost surefire way to "be creative", and it's necessary that someone does it every once in a while. But for the most part, I don't feel like digesting hundreds of pages of dormative formulas in order to understand e.g. statistical learning theory. I feel my time would be much better spent just getting on with my own inventions, and reading up on stuff that's directly relevant to it (or seemingly completely unrelated, in order to look for new applications).

Simply unacceptable

Defamation of religion is now a violation of human rights. I'd love to be able to just laugh at this, but it's far too serious to to be a laughing matter. Actually, just reading this fills me with primitive and undignified anger.

For the record, I don't consider any religion worthy of any sort of respect or protection. On the contrary, I think an enlightened and modern society should work towards harm reduction and possibly eventual elimination of religion with peaceful and rights-respecting means, similarly to how most western countries counteract tobacco smoking and its harmful effects.

(Thanks to Shane.)

No privacy without piracy!

This slogan just appeared to me. I don't think I've seen it anywhere else.

The idea is that any method I've ever heard of for eradicating piracy, and indeed any conceivable method for doing so, build on also eradicating (or at least severely curtailing) privacy.

So if people start spreading this meme around, maybe the two issues (privacy and piracy) would become more linked in the general debate and in people's minds.

No privacy without piracy! You can't have one without the other.

Do you agree?

"Machine learning"

Yahoo! have* posted their list of key scientific challenges in machine learning. I don't work on and hardly know anything at all about any of these topics. In fact, I think I understand what the question is in only three out of five cases.

Funny. I've always seen myself as working on some sort of machine learning, using computational intelligence methods. But if this is machine learning, I'm certainly not working on machine learning - it's about as related to my work as meteorology or linguistics is. So I should probably not say that I work on machine learning any more than I say that I work on meteorology or linguistics.

I'm actually OK with this, as I can still claim that I'm a computational intelligence researcher. Good enough for me.

But still... who gets to set the agenda? Ten years ago, what I do was machine learning; at least if Tom Mitchell's book is anything to go by. Nowadays, the important "machine learning" conferences such as NIPS and ICML wouldn't even look at the sort of stuff I do, irrespective of its quality. This is mildly annoying, as these conferences somehow have more prestige than CEC, Gecco and PPSN (probably because of ridiculously low acceptance rates).

And, most importantly: how does this semantic drift affect who gets the grant money?

* My intuition is really to write "Yahoo! has posted" here, as Yahoo! is a corporate entity usually referred to as it rather than they. However, British English seems to want to have it otherwise.

Kurukshetra AI Game Dev Event

Sanjeev Chandran recently told me about this Game AI event, part of an international science festival in Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad (India). One of the competitions that forms part of the event concerns automatic content creation, and I was told it is inspired by my work. Cool!

Sanjeev chose the classic Lunar Lander game as the domain. In the automatic content creation competition, participants are expected to come up with ways of automatically designing the lunar surface as well as setting parameters such as gravity in order to make the game more fun for human players.



I think that with a game as simple as Lunar Lander, there is lots of scope for focusing the development effort on the AI/CI algorithms rather than petty technical questions. The rules for the competition are quite loose, as is the objective and scoring. This could be a problem, but could also mean that we see some really creative submissions.

In any case, it will be very interesting to see what comes out of this!