Speedrun ruiner research idea

lukehmiles

Edit Apr 14: To be perfectly clear, this is another cheap thing you can add to your monitoring/control system; this is not a panacea or deep insight folks. Just a Good Thing You Can Do™.

Central claim: If you can make a tool to prevent players from glitching games *in the general case*, then it will probably also work pretty well for RL with (non-superintelligent) advanced AI systems.
- Alternative title: RL reward+environment autorobustifier
Problem addressed: every RL thing ever trained found glitches/edge-cases in the reward function or the game/physics-sim/etc and exploited those until the glitches were manually patched
- Months ago I saw a tweet from someone at OpenAI saying, yes, of course this happens with RLHF as well. (I can't find it. Anyone have it bookmarked?
Obviously analogous 'problem': Most games get speedrun into oblivion by gamers.

Portal: How To Get Outside Without Cheats (360)

Idea: Make a software system that can automatically detect glitchy behavior in the RAM of **any** game (like a cheat engine in reverse) and thereby ruin the game's speedrunability.
- You can imagine your system gets a score from a human on a given game:
  - Game is unplayable:
    score := -1
  - Blocks glitch:
    score += 10 * [importance of that glitch]
  - Blocks unusually clever but non-glitchy behavior:
    score -=5 * [in-game benefit of that behavior]
  - Game is laggy:^[1]
    score := score * [proportion of frames dropped]
  - Tool requires non-glitchy runs on a game as training data:
    score -= 2 * [human hours required to make non-glitchy runs]
    / [human hours required to discover the glitch]
Further defense of the analogy between general anti-speedrun tool and general RL reward+environment robustifier:
- Speedrunners are smart as hell
- Both have similar fuzzy boundaries that are hard to formalize:
  'player played game very well' vs 'player broke the game and didn't play it'
  is like
  'agent did the task very well' vs 'agent broke our sim and did not learn to do what we need it to do'
  - In other words, you don't want to punish talented-but-fair players.
- Both must run tolerably fast (can't afford to kill the AI devs' research iteration speed or increase training costs much)
- Both must be 'cheap enough' to develop & maintain
Breakdown of analogy: I think such a tool could work well through GPT alphazero 5, but probably not GodAI6

(Also if random reader wants to fund this idea, I don't have plans for May-July yet.)

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  "seriousness": "total",
  "checked if someone already did/said this": false,
  "confidence that": {
    "idea is worth doing at all": "80%",
    "one can successfully build a general anti-speedrun thing": "25%",
    "tools/methods would transfer well to modern AI RL training": "50%"
  }
}

^{^}
Note that "laggy" is indeed the correct/useful notion, not eg "average CPU utilization increase" because "lagginess" conveniently bundles key performance issues in both the game-playing and RL-training case: loading time between levels/tasks is OK; more frequent & important actions being slower is very bad; turn-based things can be extremely slow as long as they're faster than the agent/player; etc.

[-]mako yass15d10

Are you proposing applying this to something potentially prepotent? Or does this come with corrigibility guarantees? If you applied it to a prepotence, I'm pretty sure this would be an extremely bad idea. The actual human utility function (the rules of the game as intended) supports important glitch-like behavior, where cheap tricks can extract enormous amounts of utility, which means that applying this to general alignment has the potential of foreclosing most value that could have existed.

Example 1: Virtual worlds are a weird out-of-distribution part of the human utility function that allows the AI to "cheat" and create impossibly good experiences by cutting the human's senses off from the real world and showing them an illusion. As far as I'm concerned, creating non-deceptive virtual worlds (like, very good video games) is correct behavior and the future would be immeasurably devalued if it were disallowed.

Example 2: I am not a hedonist, but I can't say conclusively that I wouldn't become one (turn out to be one) if I had full knowledge of my preferences, and the ability to self-modify, as well as lots of time and safety to reflect, settle my affairs in the world, set aside my pride, and then wirehead. This is a glitchy looking behavior that allows the AI to extract a much higher yield of utility from each subject by gradually warping them into a shape where they lose touch with most of what we currently call "values", where one value dominates all of the others. If it is incorrect behavior, then sure, it shouldn't be allowed to do that, but humans don't have the kind of self-reflection that is required to tell whether it's incorrect behavior or not, today, and if it's correct behavior, forever forbidding it is actually a far more horrifying outcome, what you'd be doing is, in some sense of 'suffering', forever prolonging some amount of suffering. That's fine if humans tolerate and prefer some amount of suffering, but we aren't sure of that yet.