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, DeepMind researchers give a brief overview of the "new family of imaginative design approaches". The so-called imaginary agents, or I2As, use an internal fantasy encoder that helps AI decide what is and what is not useful predictions 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.
I2A carriers were tasked with testing 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 in which a little alien has to push the boxes to the right place - he can't pull the boxes though, so one wrong move can make you miss the whole 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 told Neuron, creating imaginative machines that can compete with what we can do "is perhaps the most difficult challenge for AI research: to build an agent that can design hierarchically, be truly creative and it produces solutions to challenges here and now without the need for the human mind. ”
Step by step, we'll probably get there too.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
