Tech & Society
Cube Controversy
OpenAI trained a five-fingered robotic hand to unscramble the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, bringing both acclaim and criticism. The AI research lab OpenAI trained a mechanical hand to balance, twist, and turn the cube.
Simulation
Tech & Society
Autonomous Drones Ready to Race
Pilots in drone races fly souped-up quadcopters around an obstacle course at 120 miles per hour. But soon they may be out of a job, as race organizers try to spice things up with drones controlled by AI.
Business
A Robot in Every Kitchen
Every home is different. That makes it difficult for domestic robots to translate skills learned in one household into another. Training in virtual reality, where the robot has access to rich information about three-dimensional objects, can make it easier to generalize skills to the real world.
Tech & Society
Nothing but (Neural) Net
Basketball coaches sketch plays on a whiteboard to help players get the ball through the net. A new AI model predicts how opponents would respond to these tactics. A team of researchers in Taiwan trained a conditional generative adversarial network on data from National Basketball Association games.
Tech & Society
Ready or Not
Independent research lab OpenAI designed virtual agents to play hide-and-seek. They evolved increasingly clever strategies, eventually hacking the game world’s physics to gain advantage.
Machine Learning Research
Working Through Uncertainty
How to build robots that respond to novel situations? When prior experience is limited, enabling a model to describe its uncertainty can enable it to explore more avenues to success.
Machine Learning Research
Get Your Kicks With DRL
Researchers typically test deep reinforcement learning algorithms on games from Space Invaders to StarCraft. The Google Brain team in Zurich adds another option: football, also known as soccer.