Elizr
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2014–2016
4:41 · 288K views · Apr 19, 2014
A short smartphone-recorded clip from a 2014 event in Paris where DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis presents an AI learning to play old Atari games. The system learns from only the video signal and the score. Audio quality is poor.
HN commenters use it as the canonical demo of deep reinforcement learning, noting that watching it teaches more than an article does.
6 comments from Hacker News
The Deepmind Atari Player is only 22KB of source code: [LINK] If you haven't seen the video it's remarkable: this video
Thanks for the correction. The "arbitrary" qualifier is not in TFA, but (as, indeed, you said) that's the point of the demo, e.g.: this video Note that they're using just the video signal from the game as input. It's really a sad comment on the state of reporting at MIT Tech Review that you learn more about the tech from a youtube video than from an article. (My complaint is not with the DeepMind people, it's with the article, which should put the work in context.)
In psychology, this is called "Reinforcement"[1] and that goes back to Skinner (1938) and Thorndike (1911). In AI research its called "Reinforcement learning"[2]. One of the earliest papers relating reinforcement learning to AI was “Theory of Neural-Analog Reinforcement Systems”[3] by Minsky, 1954 A cool reinforcement learning demo is the DeepMind Atari video from last year[4] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] this video (this is awesome)
AGI is the idea of creating general intelligence. Which almost certainly requires some reinforcement learning (the ways dogs and humans learn, by having a goal and an internal reward system). Deepmind's Atari player is based on deep reinforcement learning, where increasing the score represents a reward: this video I used to believe the moving goalpost idea, that AI is anything that isn't yet possible. I now disagree. I saved myself a lot of energy by avoiding entirely the question "what counts as AI?" by switching to the question, "what counts as AGI?" which is a term with a clearer threshold: [LINK]
I was also under the misapprehension that deep learning is just about classification, but that isn't true. Yes, reinforcement learning is the path to general intelligence, and the deep learning community is showing impressive progress on that front as well. The Deepmind demo [1] and the recent robotics work at Berkeley[2] are good examples. Thanks for the link to Stan Franklin's work. I'm glad to hear there is work to integrate the two approaches. [1] this video [2] [LINK]