Google’s DeepMind team is teaching artificial intelligence to think like humans.
General artificial intelligence is where the challenge really lies. For now the approach to the field of automation has been vertical. Machines, algorithms, are very good at doing a task. So much so that they have even learned to be better with practice, a skill associated with adaptation to the environment. Today it is already clear that robots can learn for themselves. What is still far away is that they do it in any field.
Deep Blue was a representative example of how a machine can outperform people on a particular task. If the IBM supercomputer was able to win at chess champion Gary Kasparov, now the challenge overcome is the Go.
DeepMind, from Google, has managed to beat the Go world champion, leaving him virtually no choice. It is a game with rules that make it complex for a machine to display a good performance. Obviously, this is a sample of the evolution that algorithms and computing power have had. But it’s still the same concept, the narrow or weak artificial intelligence.
But DeepMind managers want to go beyond this concept. The team is now working on a general or strong artificial intelligence. According to two new papers published by the team, they try to teaching machines to think like humans.
In some areas, the results have been promising. Algorithms outperform people. The area studied is relational reasoning , which allows you to compare different objects or ideas. A faculty widely used by humans.
DeepMind researchers have worked on geometric figures, both in two and three dimensions. Algorithms had to guess certain characteristics of the represented objects and they had to do it based on the comparison with the rest of the figures.
It is a way of gaining knowledge and learning very similar to that of humans. In the end, comparing serves to measure, to understand, to classify. People constantly use relational reasoning, so if machines acquire this ability, the possibilities multiply. And, of course, general artificial intelligence is also coming.
Images: Iisalmen kaupunginkirjasto, jaci XIII
