Yes! Collaborative design (both of [un]intentional) could be contextualized 
with obscurity. (I think I've told the story of how my D&D group evolved into a 
collaborative fiction group after we all left home. We'd each take over 
authorship of each others' characters for a "letter" and send the whole packet 
down the line. Because each of us, as Dungeon Masters took various issues with 
players' silly characters, the collaborative fiction mode allowed us to do 
things like humiliate those characters when it was our turn to be author. Not 
quite the same as the blinding in the exquisite corpse, but a bit adversarial.)

And although I'm blown away by the things we (well someone, not me) can achieve 
with GAN, it still feels stilted to me ... a bit like the exploitation pitfalls 
in evolutionary computing (EC, e.g. negative altitude) or overfitted models. It 
brings to mind /procedural generation <e.g. 
https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse>/ as well. What I think EricS's 
idea of a multi-method constructing structure brings to the table is that 
collaboration can take many forms. And it maybe *must* take multiple forms in 
order to "round out" the composite probability distribution(s). A GAN (or EC) 
still seems a bit "flat" or "thin" in it's schematic guiding of a trajectory 
through the possible-needed space ("space" isn't the right word for such a 
self-constructing, dynamic thing, obviously). A minimal set of structures ... a 
kind of spanning basis for the collection of constructing/correcting mechanisms 
would be an ideal goal. And generation (the "G", what I've called Twitch) and 
discrimination are only 2 of them. Discrimination, in particular, seems ripe 
for a finer-grained, composite, implementation ... maybe that's why GANs still 
seem "thin" to me. But "adversarial" is also over-simplified. E.g. in the 
exquisite corpse (and our bad faith collaborative fiction), any one player's 
intention is not *entirely* adversarial, only slightly so. In the end all the 
players *want* some mix of cooperation, competition, syndication, and a sense 
of "fair play" ... as well as the ability to "game"/"cheese" it in bad faith 
sometimes.


Pixel-wasting story time: Renee' and I bought a truck on Monday. The finance 
people made a few errors during the transaction, but it was all resolved in 
seeming good faith. When I returned with my title for the trade-in, they pulled 
me aside and said they'd made another error in the contract and we needed to 
sign a new contract. Well, the new contract has me borrowing *more* money. I 
did a speedy ethical calculation deciding whether to "play hard ball" and argue 
that we had a contract and if they screwed themselves, too fscking bad. Nobody 
would fault me for that. But it's clear the dealership would get pinged by the 
umbrella (Ford) and whoever made the error would be pinged by their co-workers 
(maybe even docked pay -- they're not a commission dealership). And although 
the amount irritates me, it may well *hurt* whoever made the error. So my 
choice was a) play hard ball and stick to that (which they could also play hard 
ball on their side and since the relationship is asymmetric, they may well win) 
versus b) just signing the new contract and taking the hit "for the team". 
Since I'll be taking the truck into their service department as long as we live 
here, they're on my team in some sense. Essentially, I had the choice of 
adversary or in-group correcting collaborator. I chose the latter and gave them 
a bunch of sh¡t about how I didn't want to borrow that much and how my first 
big purchase here in WA (with a whopping sales tax -- I could have gone down to 
Oregon to do this) ... yadda yadda. These are *rich* collaborations that I'd 
like to see us constructively implement in our AI ... or better named ALife.


On 5/26/20 8:51 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> While walking to get a couple of bottles of wine today, I started thinking 
> about
> collaborative games we play that rely on /privacy by obscurity/. The first 
> image to
> pop into mind was the /exquisite corpse 
> <https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-explaining-exquisite-corpse-surrealist-drawing-game-die>/.
>  Somehow I think it might be fruitful
> to think about the role various orders of privacy play in even our 
> well-defined
> games. Referring back to our discussion of GANs 
> <https://towardsdatascience.com/using-artificial-intelligence-to-create-people-cars-and-cats-5117189d0625>,
>  I got to thinking about the
> role of privacy in producing more realistic images of cats than it seems 
> possible
> with non-adversarial nets. Any thoughts?


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