DeepMind: DeepMind's AI company Google, based in London, created two different types of AI that can use their imagination to plan the future and perform work with a higher rate of success than AI without imagination.
Are you confused?
In a publication on their website, The researchers of DeepMind give a brief overview of the "new family of approaches to imagination-based design". So-called fantasy agents, or I2As, use an internal fantasy encoder that helps the AI decide which ones are and which aren't useful forecasts for the future.
Researchers argue that AI's imagination is vital to addressing real problems where you sometimes need to mentally test some possible outcomes of your actions to predict or decide which is the best.
Recently, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis wrote a document published in Neuron on how the development of AI's general purpose depends on understanding and codifying human abilities such as imagination, curiosity and memory. His company seems to make progress in at least one of these human abilities.
The I2A carrier machines were tasked with controlling different situations for scientists to observe their predictive abilities. Among the tests was a Sokoban puzzle game as well as a spaceship navigation game. Sokoban is a puzzle game where a little alien has to push boxes into the right place – he can't pull boxes though, so a wrong movement it can make you lose the entire round.
I2A carrier vehicles performed much better than machines not using I2A. They learned how to navigate the less experienced jigsaws by extracting more information from internal simulations that they were doing.
Of course, the type of fantasy described in Demis Hassabis's paper is not even approaching the way people use their imagination. But the experiment shows that AIs can work much better when imagining different scenarios before they act.
As Hassabis reported in Neuron, creating imaginative machines that can compete with what we can do “is probably the most difficult challenge for research of AI: to build an agent that can plan hierarchically, be truly creative, and produce solutions to challenges here and now without the need for a human mind.”
Step by step, we'll probably get there too.
