Google Creates AI Program That Uses Reasoning To Navigate the London Tube (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Google scientists have created a computer program that uses basic reasoning to learn to navigate the London Underground system by itself. Deep learning has recently stormed ahead of other computing strategies in tasks like language translation, image and speech recognition and even enabled a computer to beat top-ranked player, Lee Sedol, at Go. However, until now the technique has generally performed poorly on any task where an overarching strategy is needed, such as navigation or extracting the actual meaning from a text. The latest program achieved this by adding an external memory, designed to temporarily store important pieces of information and fish them out when needed. The human equivalent of this is working memory, a short-term repository in the brain that allows us to stay on task when doing something that involves several steps, like following a recipe. In the study, published in the journal Nature, the program was able to find the quickest route between underground stops and work out where it would end up if it traveled, say, two stops north from Victoria station. It was also given story snippets, such as "John is in the playground. John picked up the football." followed by the question "Where is the football?" and was able to answer correctly, hinting that in future assistants such Apple's Siri may be replaced by something more sophisticated. Alex Graves, the research scientist at Google DeepMind in London who led the work, said that while the story tasks "look so trivial to a human that they don't seem like questions at all," existing computer programs "do really badly on this." The program he developed got questions like this right 96% of the time.

Comments

Re:I can't answer the question either

[Jon Peterson]

Human language is brilliantly imprecise.

It's a feature not a bug. A really big feature.

Say what? Fuzzy logic and Beyond 2000.

[wjcofkc]

I remember an episode of Beyond 2000 around 1992 or so. It featured a fuzzy logic system the Japanese had implemented in their own subway\tram system. Each train and each stop had the system and they were networked together so that the trains and stops could work together to maximize efficiency. I remember be amazed by it. This sounds awfully similar,

Although it could not respond to questions about a football.

To which I say: what the fuck? If I am on a rail system I want the computer to be thinking about its job, not a fucking football.

Re:What's the reason for reason?

[_merlin]

HK Octopus predates London Oyster. The name comes from the Chinese name of the card "Baat Daaht Tung", literally "Eight-Arrived Passage" but figuratively "Access All Areas", eight referring to the cardinal and semicardinal points of the compass. Octopus is a catchy English name with a reference to eight in it.