How a poker-playing AI could help prevent your next bout of the flu – ExtremeTech

Youd be forgiven for finding little exceptional about the latest defeat of an arsenal of poker champions by the computer algorithm Libratus in Pittsburgh last week. After all, inthe last decade or two, computers have made a habit of crushingboard game heroes. And at first blush, this appears to be just another iteration in that all-too-familiar story. Peel back a layer though, and the most recent AI victory is as disturbing as it is compelling. Lets explore the compelling side of the equation before digging into the disturbing implications of the Libratus victory.

By now, many of us are familiar with the idea of AI helping out in healthcare. For the last year or so IBM has been bludgeoning us with TV commercials about its Jeopardy-winning Watson platform, now being put to use to help oncologists diagnose and treat cancer. And while I wish to take nothing away from that achievement, Watson is a question answering system with no capacity for strategic thinking. The latter topic belongs to a class of situations more germane to the field of game theory. Game theory is usually tucked underthe sub-genre of economics, for it deals with how entities make strategic decisions in the pursuit of self interest. Its also the discipline from which the AI poker playing algorithm Libratus gets its smarts.

What does this have to do with health care and the flu? Think of disease as a game between strategic entities. Picture avirus as one player, a player with a certain set of attack and defense strategies. When the virus encounters your body, a game ensues, in which your body defends with its own strategies and hopefully prevails. This game has been going on a long time, with humans having only a marginal ability to control the outcome. Our bodys natural defenses have been developed in evolutionary time, and thus have a limited ability to make on the fly adaptations.

But what if we could recruit computers to be our allies in this game against viruses? And what if the same reasoning ability that allowed Libratus to prevail over the best poker mindsin the world could tacklehow to defeat a virus or a bacterial infection? This is in fact the subject of a compelling research paperby Toumas Sandholm, the designer of the Libratus algorithm. In it, he explains at length how an AI algorithm could be used for drug design and disease prevention.

With only the health of the entire human race at stake, its hard to imagine a rationale that would discourage us from making use of such a strategic superpower. Now for the disturbing part of story, and the so-called fable of the sparrows recounted by Nick Bostrom in his singular work Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies. In the preface to the book, he tells of a group of sparrows who recruit a baby owl to help defend them against other predators, not realizing the owl might one day grow up and devour them all. In Libratus, an algorithm thats in essence a universal strategic game-playing machine, and is likely capable of besting humankind in any number of real-world strategic games, we may have finally met our owl. And while the end of the story between ourselves and Libratus has yet to be determined, prudence would surely advise we tread carefully.

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How a poker-playing AI could help prevent your next bout of the flu - ExtremeTech