<story><title>Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/google-large-scale-robotic-grasping-project</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanjshaw</author><text>I always thought this was the only way to build a true AI -- build a &amp;#x27;virtual baby&amp;#x27; that has to go through much the same experiences as a human baby.  I&amp;#x27;m sure this idea has been explored somewhere already - anybody have any pointers?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackhack</author><text>This is precisely the approach taken at MIT under Prof. Rod Brooks:  &amp;quot;Within  our  group,  Marjanovic,  Scassellati  &amp;amp;  Williamson(1996) applied a similar bootstrapping technique to enable the robot* to learn to  point  to  a  visual  target. &amp;quot;
*named Cog, short for &amp;quot;Cognition&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;people.csail.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;brooks&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;CMAA-group.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;people.csail.mit.edu&amp;#x2F;brooks&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;CMAA-group.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I may paraphase, his model is biologically inspired -- believing hierarchical layers of behaviours, lack of a central planning model (distributed processing), and physical and temporal placement in the world (rather than abstractions of the world, or observe&amp;#x2F;process&amp;#x2F;react loops) are essential to the formation of a truly intelligent machine.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Wants to Solve Robotic Grasping by Letting Robots Learn for Themselves</title><url>http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/google-large-scale-robotic-grasping-project</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ryanjshaw</author><text>I always thought this was the only way to build a true AI -- build a &amp;#x27;virtual baby&amp;#x27; that has to go through much the same experiences as a human baby.  I&amp;#x27;m sure this idea has been explored somewhere already - anybody have any pointers?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peterwwillis</author><text>Physical babies take a long time to adapt and form complex connections (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.urbanchildinstitute.org&amp;#x2F;why-0-3&amp;#x2F;baby-and-brain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.urbanchildinstitute.org&amp;#x2F;why-0-3&amp;#x2F;baby-and-brain&lt;/a&gt;). There are probably a lot of shortcuts one could take to train it for specific tasks.&lt;p&gt;In &amp;#x27;The Matrix&amp;#x27; they had developed programs that could be uploaded to a physical brain to essentially pre-wire the brain with complex synaptic connections (or so I imagine was the effect). That would be a lot more efficient than waiting 3 years just to get to the point of trimming useless connections. We may have to &amp;#x27;grow&amp;#x27; a virtual brain via training to develop the basic platform, but then pre-load it with operations to save time.</text></comment>