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AI Trained To Navigate Develops Brain-Like Location Tracking (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Now that DeepMind has solved Go, the company is applying DeepMind to navigation. Navigation relies on knowing where you are in space relative to your surroundings and continually updating that knowledge as you move. DeepMind scientists trained neural networks to navigate like this in a square arena, mimicking the paths that foraging rats took as they explored the space. The networks got information about the rat's speed, head direction, distance from the walls, and other details. To researchers' surprise, the networks that learned to successfully navigate this space had developed a layer akin to grid cells. This was surprising because it is the exact same system that mammalian brains use to navigate. More DeepMind experiments showed that only the neural networks that developed layers that "resembled grid cells, exhibiting significant hexagonal periodicity (gridness)," could navigate more complicated environments than the initial square arena, like setups with multiple rooms. And only these networks could adjust their routes based on changes in the environment, recognizing and using shortcuts to get to preassigned goals after previously closed doors were opened to them. The study has been reported in the journal Science.
This is just like the human mind. After all, it is called "DeepMind" and uses "neural networks". Surely it operates just like the human mind does! I mean look at what it can do: "could adjust their routes based on changes in the environment, recognizing and using shortcuts to get to preassigned goals after previously closed doors were opened to them." Truly groundbreaking results. And also "This was surprising because it is the exact same system that mammalian brains use to navigate." Truly amazing! These guys also know how mammalian brains navigate! How can I invest?
To solve a game means you know the optimum move to make (and therefore know the winner of the game from the start). Deepmind has only defeated humans, not solved the game.
Wow.
Says reported in the journal Science, then links to an article in the journal Nature.
Next step is to formulate the training set that causes the similar structures that are related to self awareness and consciousness to emerge in the machine. The promise of independent verification must be feeling very nice for the neuroscientists.
Half the Natural Intelligence on the planet knows that if you just ask for directions will get you faster there than playing with gizmos.
A dildo is NOT "AI."
Pretty fascinating that evolution takes the same path, biological or mechanical, when presented with the same challenge situation. Super fascinating. Makes you wonder about mammals, if a computer is evolving the same mechanisms as real-world life did.
Think divine rules, so instead of a random dice game over millions of years, we have particular designs falling out from the progression of the universe.
Yep, that's a pretty shitty scientific-journalism article. Go isn't solved, AI players now beat human players. Throwing out a definition of "navigation" like anyone doesn't know what it is. Claiming we know how brains navigate. And I really almost missed the link to the ACTUAL paper at the bottom.
But the paper? The paper doesn't jump out as immediate shit. For example, apparently we DO know how mammalian brains navigate:
[AI fails] to rival the proficiency of mammalian spatial behaviour, which is underpinned by grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (Hafting, T., Fyhn, M., Molden, S., Moser, M.-B. & Moser, E. I. Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature 436, 801–806 (2005).)
huh.
And then these people tried to mimic that. "Here we set out to leverage the computational functions of grid cells to develop a deep reinforcement learning agent with mammal-like navigational abilities". It's not that AI developed this, the researchers specifically developed AI to have it. The research is real. It's kinda interesting. It's nothing ground-breaking (and actually seems kinda.... college-student level... but I dunno) but is another incremental improvement in the field of study.
The fuckwit journalist who butchered it (that's DIANA GITIG - 5/11/2018, 5:15 AM btw) needs to stop with the hype bullshit. It diminishes arstechnica as a trash rag that can't even report on pop science.
The military uses of this are apocalyptic.
That is what they are called now.