Google Taught An ‘Ant’ To Play Soccer

Google Taught An ‘Ant’ To Play Soccer

DeepMind beat a world champion of Go, so now it wants to try its hand at a much more popular game. Sorta.

Google says it’s used DeepMind to teach an ant to play soccer — that is, if you consider the beige four-legged ball an “ant” and the act of manipulating a black-and-white ball into a red space “soccer”.

The description may be somewhat exaggerated, but the development is cool: The project shows DeepMind’s reinforcement learning abilities. Through a combination of trial-and-error and deep learning, the AI quickly learns the mechanics of kicking the ball into the goal.

Engadget points out that this technology could be used for manipulating animal-like robots and help them manoeuvre in the world with much less training. Just imagine what this kind of advance could have done for the robot that ran away.

[Google, via Engadget]


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