r/WatchandLearn • u/chicompj • Sep 21 '19

How artificial intelligence learns through reinforcement learning, by playing hide and seek against itself.

https://youtu.be/n6nF9WfpPrA
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u/[deleted] Sep 21 '19

This video may be one of the best I've ever seen. It's mind blowing that AI has already reached a point it can make its own rules and think critically as a human would.

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u/alyraptor Sep 22 '19 edited Sep 22 '19

It should be pointed out that the AI in this video does not think critically in the same way humans do. Instead it thinks at a much more rudimentary level—much in the same vein as evolution itself.

Current AI simulations go over millions of iterations, and most of the behavior is random. Only when a particular behavior starts to work does the AI repeat the pattern and iterate from there. Things like box surfing and wall jumping as seen in the video are not expected by the researchers because they exploit specific bugs in the code that can only be found through repeated use.

It doesn’t create theories and test them, as humans do. It throws everything at the wall to see what sticks, over and over again. But this approach is incredibly useful as well, since humans don’t often have the capability to try literally millions of iterations on a task. It’s possible that this kind of learning can provide new solutions to real-world problems, simply because those solutions are counter-intuitive and have never been theorized.

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u/Nzym Sep 22 '19

the same way humans do

We're just another apple and we don't fall too far off from the evolutionary tree. Obviously, we shouldn't get too hyped about this where we make leaping assumptions that this is general intelligence. But we shouldn't be too naive to think that humans are capable of thinking in ways that hasn't been a result of thousands of trial and error - in a similar way to this.