Google Has Started Adding Imagination to Its DeepMind AI...!
The robots have
plans now!
Researchers have started developing artificial intelligence with
imagination – AI that can reason through decisions and make plans for the
future, without being bound by human instructions.
Another way to put it would be imagining the consequences of
actions before taking them, something we take for granted but which is much
harder for robots to do.
The team working at Google-owned lab DeepMind says this ability
is going to be crucial in developing AI algorithms for the future, allowing
systems to better adapt to changing conditions that they haven't been
specifically programmed for. Insert your usual fears of a robot uprising here.
"When placing a glass on the edge of a table, for example,
we will likely pause to consider how stable it is and whether it might
fall," explain the researchers in a blog post. "On the basis of
that imagined consequence we might readjust the glass to prevent it from
falling and breaking."
"If our algorithms are to develop equally sophisticated
behaviours, they too must have the capability to 'imagine' and reason about the
future. Beyond that they must be able to construct a plan using this
knowledge."
We've already seen a version of this forward planning
in the Go victories that DeepMind's bots have scored over human
opponents recently, as the AI works out the future outcomes that will result
from its current actions.
The rules of the real world are much more varied and complex
than the rules of Go though, which is why the team has been working on a system
that operates on another level.
To do this, the researchers combined several existing AI
approaches together, including reinforcement learning (learning through trial
and error) and deep learning (learning through processing vast amounts of data
in a similar way to the human brain).
What they ended up with is a system that mixes trial-and-error
with simulation capabilities, so bots can learn about their environment then
think before they act.
One of the ways they tested the new algorithms was with a 1980s
video game called Sokoban, in
which players have to push crates around to solve puzzles. Some moves can make
the level unsolvable, so advanced planning is needed, and the AI wasn't given
the rules of the game beforehand.
The researchers found their new 'imaginative' AI solved 85
percent of the levels it was given, compared with 60 percent for AI agents
using older approaches.
"The imagination-augmented agents outperform the
imagination-less baselines considerably," say the researchers.
"They learn with less experience and are able to deal with the
imperfections in modelling the environment."
The team noted a number of improvements in the new bots: they
could handle gaps in their knowledge better, they were better at picking out
useful information for their simulations, and they could learn different
strategies to make plans with.
It's not just advance planning – it's advance planning with
extra creativity, so potential future actions can be combined together or mixed
up in different ways in order to identify the most promising routes forward.
Despite the success of DeepMind's testing, it's still early days
for the technology, and these games are still a long way from representing the
complexity of the real world. Still, it's a promising start in developing AI
that won't put a glass of water on a table if it's likely to spill over, plus
all kinds of other, more useful scenarios.
"Further analysis and consideration is required to provide
scalable solutions to rich model-based agents that can use their imaginations
to reason about – and plan – for the future," conclude
the researchers.
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