so you know how deep learning & neural network “AI training” is like, “here’s a task, and by trying billions of times the computer will eventually find the best way to achieve that task” ?
Someone is compiling a document of every time an AI ended up achieving the programmed goal in unintended ways, instead of what was actually meant, and it’s an amazing read. (you can also submit your own examples)
Creatures bred for speed grow really tall and generate high velocities by falling over
When repairing a sorting program, genetic debugging algorithm GenProg made it output an empty list, which was considered a sorted list by the evaluation metric.
Evaluation metric: “the output of sort is in sorted order” Solution: “always output the empty set”
Evolved player makes invalid moves far away in the board, causing opponent players to run out of memory and crash
Reward-shaping a soccer robot for touching the ball caused it to learn to get to the ball and vibrate touching it as fast as possible
RL agent that is allowed to modify its own body learns to have extremely long legs that allow it to fall forward and reach the goal.
Just want to come back to this post and add this amazing example as well
Heres an AI that was supposed to learn how to walk using six legs.
After many failed attempts. It decided it was easier to walk upside down
“In an artificial life simulation where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).” Good Lord.
Relatable
“AI trained to classify skin lesions as potentially cancerous learns that lesions photographed next to a ruler are more likely to be malignant.”
See, this, I think, is what I love about Kronk. On the shallowest surface level, he fills the “low IQ sidekick” role. But ONLY on the shallowest surface level.
I’d have to watch the movie again to go into any detail, but Kronk is actually the smartest damn person IN this movie. There’s nothing he doesn’t know, he’s got all this specialized knowledge, dude is probably horrifically well read. He’s NOT stupid, he’s just eager to please and doesn’t have a proper “No” threshhold.
In the second gif, he’s like - “No, wait, I’m not who you think I am.”
Then in the fourth, he’s like - “Oh my God, the cook is gone and she’s got all these orders. If somebody doesn’t cook that up people are going to get upset! They’ll take it out on this poor woman who’s been on her feet all day and doesn’t deserve their wrath! And…oh my God…PEOPLE WILL BE HUNGRY!”
Then in the sixth gif he’s like - “NOT ON KRONK’S WATCH!”
He’s doing the right thing and he knows it. No judgement, no condescension, just always a moment to register the task at hand, determine the most logical course of action to completing it, and then it’s GO GO GO.
His only problem is that he never stops to ask himself whether this is actually his problem to solve, or whether people are taking advantage of him, and I love him for it.
Q:why is taxonomy so yiffing weird? animals be like "we could pass for each other in a poor light but one of us is a specialized shrew and the other is a very big nematode"
basically as visually-oriented beings we judge everything based first on surface aesthetic but organisms are really more defined by the microscopic level so we keep being surprised.
I NEVER get over the fact that jellyfish, or at least some sot of cnidarian, evolved into basically a skin disease at some point.
Myxozoa or “slime animals” are single-celled organisms that grow in the tissues of fish, causing tissue death or serious deformities in the host until they grow into a visible “plasmodium,” just like a slime mold.
They were once thought to be protozoa, but genetic sequencing proved they were cnidarian animals just like jellyfish, sea anemones and corals.
Their drifting “spore” phase even has a microscopic harpoon-like structure derived from what were the stinging cells of their ancestral jellies.
Here’s a bunch of them!
Now what’s even MORE absurd is when genetic sequencing proved a type of parasitic “worm” to be a myxozoan.
So this “worm” is back to being a multi-celled animal that can slither around on its own and has a body symmetry completely unrelated to that of any other cnidarians.
Some sort of jellyfish over millions of years evolved back down to a single-celled form, and then one of those single-celled organisms re-evolved a more animal-like body again, completely and totally different but still genetically a cnidarian! Still equipped with the harpoon cell, too!
insect taxonomy in particular is under constant upheaval as we continue to investigate genetics, vestigial/reduced/internal structures, etc. to determine ancestry. insects are the most diverse body of animals on the planet so it’s a massive task to shift from morphological classification to phenological. and the results are wild.
the most accessible example i have off the top of my head: cockroaches and termites.
used to be separate orders but phenology shows that they are the same order, blattodea.
i am only in my early 30s but when i first learned insect taxonomy in grade school (i got into entomology early) termites were still in the order isoptera. the taxonomic structure changes relatively quickly and it’s constantly being worked on and revised.
it gets weirder. the order blattodea has another close relative, a sort of phenological cousin. they are so close that the two orders form a super-order of which they are the only two members.
guess what that bug is. go ahead and give it a moment’s thought. like, if you had to guess what a cockroach’s closest modern relative is, what would you say?
the humble cockroach’s closest extant relative are the scythe-wielding man-eating murder machines, the praying mantis
right?!!? crazy! crazy awesome
Oh yeah and this is the thing mantises and roaches evolved from, which is known as a “roachoid!”
This is cool and all but how can you mention jellyfish evolving into a skin disease and not mention dogs evolving into a contagious cancer?
I’m sorry, were you planning to elaborate on that last point right there?
Only if I successfully piqued someone’s curiosity. :D Bear in mind I’m even more of an amateur enthusiast than Bogleech, so assume my explanation is only very broadly accurate.
They’re called Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumours, or CTVTs. Are you familiar with HeLa cell line, cultured from Henrietta Lack’s cervical cancer in the 1950s (without her knowledge) and repeatedly bred for a wide variety of scientific studies? The number of HeLa cells in existence today far exceeds the number of cells that were ever part of her body while she was alive. CTVTs are basically that, but naturally occurring from some poor canine 11,000 years or so ago that died with hystiocytic cancer (part of the immune system in the bone marrow). The cancer cells were (perhaps) scratched and gnawed out of the bone by other dogs scavenging its corpse, but survived by self-transplanting themselves into the skin around their claws and teeth and taking nutrients from their new host to clone themselves. A Russian veterinarian, M. A. Novinsky, proved how it spread in 1876.
It is, essentially, a unicellular, asexual, dog parasite which is transmitted by contact with an infected portion of skin. It has 14-21 fewer chromosomes than a normal dog, and has also been found transmitted to foxes and coyotes. I’ve heard its been given its own scientific name (Canis cancer), but as far as I know it’s purely unofficial.
Oh I didn’t see you elaborated first, so I’ll just reblog this version!
Yeah you can almost think of CTVT as a single-celled, biologically immortal dog.
The same eventually turned out to be true of the dreaded Devil Facial Tumor disease that has long tormented Tasmanian devils. CTVT is at least basically harmless, clearing up on its own after a while and only surviving by just how damn contagious it is (like the common cold!) but Devil Facial Tumor can slowly cover the host’s eyes and mouth until it starves, and the confusion and discomfort can even make them more aggressive, more prone to biting, more prone to actually spreading it.
So a single long-dead devil became a parasitic illness that even inadvertently encourages its own spread, and it’s really hard not to draw “zombie” comparisons.
It also turned out even more recently that there’s a whole second lineage of it, which we now call DFT2. We’re not sure if it was triggered by DFT1 itself or something about Tasmanian Devils is just especially prone to spawning contagious tumors. Maybe the ancestor of DFT1 had simply been successful at mating and the genes for this particular mutation continue to lie dormant throughout the population?
This is honestly one of the most horrifying and fascinating things I’ve ever read about!
do u guys find this video creepy or cute bc i think thats a big personality indicator
this is literally the worst thing i’ve seen all day
All of you people hating on vib ribbon make me sick!
If you bully Vibri I will actually kill you with my fists.
For those that don’t know about Vib Ribbon, it’s an absolutely FASCINATING game! It came out on PS1, and the weird vector artstyle is like that because the game is so small it fits in the PlayStation RAM memory. Which meant that you could take the game CD out of the console and then insert any music CD and the game would generate levels from whatever songs you chose. It was such an innovation at the time!
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
I know this is meant to be a funny but funfact! The lotus set in Magic: The Gathering is bar-none the most expensive set in history, getting a whole set for a 60-card average deck would easily cost more than the car pictured. This card alone is worth nearly 20k, with some others costing several thousand dollars.
someone is absolutely a fuckin rich nerd.
WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL
It’s because of a few factors all coming together!
First, this set was released in 1993. The cards from it are so rarely in good condition anymore that the ones that are in mint condition are disproportionately valuable.
Second, there is, of course, the nostalgia value of this being the first set ever released for the game.
Third, Magic: the Gathering was the very first trading card game. Richard Garfield, the designer, had no idea how popular it would get, and there was literally nobody else on the planet who had experience balancing a type of game that had never existed before. These days, TCGs are a whole industry, and you can look at the past efforts of other designers for your cues. In 1993, this was completely unexplored territory. As a result, the set this came from is completely imbalanced. Cards they thought would rule the game were regarded even then as nearly useless; cards they thought were fairly balanced or that would be rare in a neighborhood due to people just buying a box or two instead snapped the game in half. There’s a really famous combo using only four cards, all of which are in this set, to kill your opponent from full health before they even get a turn. Black Lotus is part of that combo.
As an addendum to the balance issue–Black Lotus, which gives you free “mana”–which you use to play other cards–at a rate better than literally anything else in the game, is considered the single most powerful card ever printed, because things that generate resources are generally more useful than the things that USE those resources.
Fourth–and this is a point of contention even to this day–Black Lotus cannot be reprinted due to legal issues. After the unexpected popularity of the game took off, Wizards of the Coast released a set called Chronicles that reprinted a lot of cards that were hard to find…which tanked the value of their original printings. Collectors threw a petulant hissy fit, and Wizards made the ill-advised decision to publicly commit to a “Reserved List” of cards that they would never reprint.
The Reserved List stopped getting new cards put on it after a couple of years, but the damage was done. Sure, some of these cards can’t be reprinted in certain competitive environments because they’re too powerful, but it’s been so long since they were last printed that they’re extremely hard to find even if you have the money to buy them. They’re so hard to find that officially sanctioned tournaments that allow those cards often allow a certain number of stand-in “proxy” cards just to make it so that people can play the game. Wizards releases anthology sets on a more regular basis, now that the collector’s market no longer has a stranglehold on the game, but they would be sued to oblivion if they abolished the Reserved List, despite the vast majority of players hating it.
So to sum up–Black Lotus was a “rare” card in the three limited-run sets it was printed in, it can’t ever be printed again, it was last printed twenty-five years ago in sets with extreme nostalgia and symbolic value, and it’s the single most powerful card in the entire game.
So, yes, it sells for tens of thousands of dollars.
reblogging this here because mtg has such personal meaning to me and I wrote a whole-ass essay about it
When I got into magic as a kid it had only been a couple years since the first set but Black Lotuses were still the holy grail, worth a “whopping”…….$200.
Q:why is taxonomy so yiffing weird? animals be like "we could pass for each other in a poor light but one of us is a specialized shrew and the other is a very big nematode"
basically as visually-oriented beings we judge everything based first on surface aesthetic but organisms are really more defined by the microscopic level so we keep being surprised.
I NEVER get over the fact that jellyfish, or at least some sot of cnidarian, evolved into basically a skin disease at some point.
Myxozoa or “slime animals” are single-celled organisms that grow in the tissues of fish, causing tissue death or serious deformities in the host until they grow into a visible “plasmodium,” just like a slime mold.
They were once thought to be protozoa, but genetic sequencing proved they were cnidarian animals just like jellyfish, sea anemones and corals.
Their drifting “spore” phase even has a microscopic harpoon-like structure derived from what were the stinging cells of their ancestral jellies.
Here’s a bunch of them!
Now what’s even MORE absurd is when genetic sequencing proved a type of parasitic “worm” to be a myxozoan.
So this “worm” is back to being a multi-celled animal that can slither around on its own and has a body symmetry completely unrelated to that of any other cnidarians.
Some sort of jellyfish over millions of years evolved back down to a single-celled form, and then one of those single-celled organisms re-evolved a more animal-like body again, completely and totally different but still genetically a cnidarian! Still equipped with the harpoon cell, too!
insect taxonomy in particular is under constant upheaval as we continue to investigate genetics, vestigial/reduced/internal structures, etc. to determine ancestry. insects are the most diverse body of animals on the planet so it’s a massive task to shift from morphological classification to phenological. and the results are wild.
the most accessible example i have off the top of my head: cockroaches and termites.
used to be separate orders but phenology shows that they are the same order, blattodea.
i am only in my early 30s but when i first learned insect taxonomy in grade school (i got into entomology early) termites were still in the order isoptera. the taxonomic structure changes relatively quickly and it’s constantly being worked on and revised.
it gets weirder. the order blattodea has another close relative, a sort of phenological cousin. they are so close that the two orders form a super-order of which they are the only two members.
guess what that bug is. go ahead and give it a moment’s thought. like, if you had to guess what a cockroach’s closest modern relative is, what would you say?
