Baidu’s AI learned English by learning to find apples in a maze
A lot of artificial intelligence today learns by trial and error. As humans, we take this concept—learning something by attempting it again and again—for granted, because our brain has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to learn new ideas quickly.
Our AI hasn’t evolved that capability (yet), leading a large swath of tech researchers to experiment with hacking this biological process through code, a process known as reinforcement learning. While this research area is usually focused on learning a task, like playing a video game or training simulated animals to leap around, Chinese search giant Baidu is doing something a little different.
Baidu is developing an AI whose main objective is to find objects in an unfamiliar maze. But instead of letting the AI explore and learn itself, the way a human would, a “teacher” algorithm commands it where to go using plain English. This way, the AI has to understand language to bolster its learning, and only by combining the two can it accomplish its task. Baidu’s approach is effectively a blueprint for what a robot would need to understand commands and navigate a house, office, or other physical space.
“We want to be able to teach a robot to do things in a human way, in a way that’s more convenient to humans and faster,” says Wei Xu, a researcher at Baidu who co-authored a newly released paper on the AI. “Language is a huge part of knowledge communication.”
So how does it work? Reward and punishment. Every time it hits a wall in the 2D, 7×7 block maze, the AI is punished. Every time it successfully locates an object (in this case a digital piece of fruit), the AI gets a reward. At least figuratively speaking: “Punishment” or “reward” in this case is determined by a number given to the AI indicating performance.
