The point is this brings us closer to demonstrating AI which is in some sense grounded in reality, as opposed to some kind of “Clever Hans” or Searle’s “Chinese Box.” The network has learned how to “imagine playing out a scenario” much like a human player might use his own mental model of the game to consider various strategies to attempt, perhaps with the real game.
That the network apparently has a mental model which is rich enough to simulate actual game play implies that it hasn’t just fit a static caricurature of the game which immediately breaks on an unseen move. That is, it has a non-trivial “conceptualization” of its environment which goes beyond simple pattern matching or nearest neighbor matching.
That the network apparently has a mental model which is rich enough to simulate actual game play implies that it hasn’t just fit a static caricurature of the game which immediately breaks on an unseen move. That is, it has a non-trivial “conceptualization” of its environment which goes beyond simple pattern matching or nearest neighbor matching.