We’ve witnessed AI do some pretty cooked stuff over the last few years.
Whether it’s turning your shitty drawings of faces into actual nightmares or creating full-blown psychedelic masterpieces, we’re witnessing the beginnings of something that has the potential to change everything we do.
Granted, it all still looks goofy as hell at this point. For example, the latest experiment has Google‘s DeepMind AI teaching itself to do goddamn parkour.
Published in a new paper called Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments, the research uses reinforced learning to teach a computer to traverse unfamiliar and complex environments.
The results are fucking hilarious. Have a look at them below.
Holy shit, that’s fantastic. I don’t know what’s better, the torso with legs or the parkour dancing man. Christ.
Amazingly, everything those little figures are doing is self-taught. What you’re seeing is the computer’s idea of the most efficient method of getting from one point to another, as janky as that may seem.
The researchers simply gave the AI some sensors so it can figure out when it’s falling over and an incentive to move forward. Everything else was learnt by trial and error.
The idea here is to train AI to get around fucked up terrain so it can be implemented in robots. Maybe that sounds familiar already…
Ahh yeah, that little guy. That’s essentially what’s being taught here.
Photo: The Office.
