Google's artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, has developed an AI that has managed to learn how to walk, run, jump, and climb without any prior guidance. The result is as impressive as it is goofy.
Keeping up with the latest AI research can be an odd experience.
Case in point is a new paper from Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind titled "Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments." The research explores how reinforcement learning can be used to teach a computer to navigate unfamiliar and complex environments.
It's the sort of fundamental AI research that we're now testing in virtual worlds, but that will one day help program robots that can navigate the stairs in your house.
The jumping, the limboing, the leaping - all of these are behaviors that the computer has devised itself as the best way of getting from A to B. All DeepMind's programmers have done is give the agent a set of virtual sensors and then incentivize to move forward.
The computer works the rest out for itself, using trial and error to come up with different ways of moving.
The novelty here is that the researchers are exploring how difficult environments can teach an agent complex and robust movements.
This research shows that isn't always the case, and that RL can be used to teach complex movements.
More info: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/7/10/15946542/deepmind-parkour-agent-reinforcement-learning