I was thinking about videogames, and how machine learning advances could be applied to them and I got thinking:
We can do detailed physics simulations of collisions pretty fast, but the more detailed we get the slower your game or sim will run.
- Could you set up a machine that solves physics problems as presented by your videogame e.g. "what happens if this bullet moving at this speed hits this wall at this angle?" through simulations that are too detailed to run in real time.
- Then you set up a machine learning system which takes the same inputs and basically guesses the answer.
- Then you set up discriminator one to guess which solutions are simulated in detail and which ones are guesses.
Then you leave them all running for ages and people playing your videogame will keep producing novel collision physics problems for the system to work with, your detailed simulator will produce correct answers to use as training data, your guessing system will get very good at guessing the right answer, and your discriminator will get better at spotting unrealistic collision physics.
Eventually you should get a machine learning system which is as good as a human at guessing what is about to happen in a physical collision. Assuming it is better than humans, it doesn't actually need to be very accurate, because human players would see the outcome and accept that it was realistic.
The same technique could be use for physics other than collisions like chemical interactions (when computers are fast enough to simulate training data), Or fluid dynamics for realistic water guessing, or an entire physics system dedicated to guessing what different explosions will look like,
So would this work to produce a good game physics engine, theoretically? Or effectively would your machine learning system be as complicated as the simulation, because we actually do know how these things work so a simulation is already faster?
Also if it did work, would anything stop the same physics engine being used IRL, maybe as part of robot's AI?
Potentially you could have many systems working together, until you have a virtual world entirely guessed by machine learning systems. (which could then be improved over time, for an endlessly improving game engine!)
So besides the super cool reality simulation you could end up with, the other fun thing would be to see if your ML system can figure out things newton's laws, or if it would figure out relativity eventually if the calculations got detailed enough and your game had enough high speed collisions?
Thoughts?