Google's DeepMind AI Just Taught Itself To Walk
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN uses it as a quick example of reinforcement learning agents acquiring locomotion in simulation, rather than recommending it as a deep resource.
What it is
A two-minute Insider Tech clip on DeepMind's simulated agents that learned to walk, run, jump and climb without guidance, with the goofy resulting gaits.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2017 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Cites abledon · 2017-10 · on “Competitive Self-Play”
It didn't annoy me, but it definitely gave off a Disney Trailer vibe. I can just hear the deep announcer voice over the video coming in: "Coming Winter 2017, A movie about adventure, friendship, AND simulated self-play! Join Burp, Jenny and Bop on a fantastic adventure .... blah blah ..." etc.. hah Heres an example of good, unobtrusive but fun music for showing AI bots: [this video]
Cites mockingbirdy · 2018-07 · on “Logic Theorist”
If you watch videos of AIs learning to run [1] or playing Mario [2], you see that there's definitely "try random shit until your reward function gives you positive feedback" as a method for training AIs. The difficult part is developing the reward function. There's a lot of intelligence in our hormone-based incentive system - that we feel pain, that we feel sad, etc. Many of those emotions are pre-programmed. If we find a way to design reinforcement systems with the right goals, we can do it like mother nature did it for several billion years. But it's still a ton of computational power required. If we look at nature as a massively parallelized computational system that defined "just live" a
Cites zro · 2020-01 · on “Using OpenAI Gym to train an open-source 3D printed robot”
I'm not sure about doing that with physical robots, but I've seen a couple interesting iterations using simulated robots [this video]
Cites ben_w · 2022-11 · on “What if regular exercise is the best cognitive exercise?”
Hardware is hard. Making an AI that learns to control a purely virtual body appears to be a fairly standard project. 1) [LINK] 2) [LINK] 3) [LINK] 4) [this video]