Tech & Society
Ready or Not
Independent research lab OpenAI designed virtual agents to play hide-and-seek. They evolved increasingly clever strategies, eventually hacking the game world’s physics to gain advantage.
Reinforcement Learning
Machine Learning Research
Working Through Uncertainty
How to build robots that respond to novel situations? When prior experience is limited, enabling a model to describe its uncertainty can enable it to explore more avenues to success.
Machine Learning Research
Leveling the Playing Field
Deep reinforcement learning has given machines apparent hegemony in vintage Atari games, but their scores have been hard to compare — with one another or with human performance — because there are no rules governing what machines can and can’t do to win. Researchers aim to change that.
Machine Learning Research
Get Your Kicks With DRL
Researchers typically test deep reinforcement learning algorithms on games from Space Invaders to StarCraft. The Google Brain team in Zurich adds another option: football, also known as soccer.
Business
DeepMind Results Raise Questions
Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind lost $572 million in the past year, and its losses over the last three years amounted to more than $1 billion. AI contrarian Gary Marcus used the news as an opportunity to question the direction of AI as an industry.