SUMMARY OF BEYOND GAMES,

BY INMACULADA RODRÍGUEZ RUIZ.

The main point of this chapter is to talk about transferring information learned from
one program to another using the example of games.

Even the creators of AlphaGo present their own game as a program able to learn how
to play on his own without been taught any kind of rules, the author object that none of
these programs can “transfer” anything to a different game. It means, nowadays, there is
still no program able to give his information learned to another program so that the second
one could use it to perform a different task.

To keep improving in this field it is important to understand how algorithms perform

on the domain of computers.

It is hard to say what these programs have learned in the games. Gary Marcus defends
that these games didn’t understand how a wall or a tunnel is, they just learned specific
contingences for particular scenarios. That means it is difficult for these games to
generalize. For that reason, we humans, as persons who are really capable of generalizing,
could affirm that the way we learn differs a lot from the way these deep W-learning
systems learn.

People usually learn to play these games like chess because we believe they teach us
to think better. Otherwise, AlphaGo has not learned to think better about anything, the
game hasn’t even learned how to think (understanding thinking as reasoning).

To finalize the chapter is important to point out that these demonstrations on games
are made to use them on real problems like healthcare and science. Anyways, there is a
long way and many obstacles to get to this aim. As we have been saying, transferring
learning is one of them. We should claim that there are a lot of differences between a
chess game, for example, and a situation in real life; like in other chapters the author
reminds us of the importance of object recognition and how the easiest tasks for humans
could be the most difficult ones to AI.

Questions:

1. Is reasoning a part of thinking? Can you think without reasoning? Are they
different actions or one involved the other one?
2. The author affirms that these games didn’t learn how to think. However, we say
that a computer or AI thinks when they follow different instructions given by
humans to come to a conclusion. Should we use another word, or we could call it
“thinking” with the human connotations that it has?
3. The author affirms that chess “teach us to think better”, what should we
understand from “thinking better”?