A robot with artificial intelligence beat people in a game of Maze marbles. This is the first time a machine has shown that it can learn and have physical abilities at the same time.
You have to move a marble around a series of obstacles and prevent the ball from falling into any of the holes. This game requires skill, patience and a light touch.
The record time to cross the maze is 15.41 seconds, set by Swede Lars Goran Danielsson, who has been practicing this sport for 35 years.
But CyberRunner, a robot made by experts at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, managed a time of 14.48 seconds after just six hours of practice.
Professor Raffaello D’Andream of Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich said: “It’s not just about beating people at games.” You have to be very physically skilled and fast to beat people in a game.
“It was important that the first model allowed a machine to beat a person in a game. It’s not just a task change that we’re doing here. We are adding measurements and more lines that need to be split.
The maze is a board game first created by the British company Brio in 1946. The marble moves on spiked boards or tiles that are handled with two handles.
Although the game is quite simple, you have to be good at fine motor skills and spatial thinking to do it well, and it takes a lot of practice to do it well.
The robot moves the handles with two motors, and a camera on top of the dashboard lets you see how it does it.
CyberRunner learns by doing, just like people do. Find out which behaviors and techniques work best by repeating them over and over again. This is called model-based reinforcement learning.
Computer scientists were surprised to learn that CyberRunner’s first instinct was to cheat, skipping parts of the maze to get through it faster.
A PhD student at ETH Zurich named Thomas Bi said: “It’s interesting that CyberRunner found shortcuts naturally as it learned.” Some parts of the puzzle were left out so you could “cheat”.
“We had to intervene and tell him very clearly not to use any of those shortcuts.”
AI has been outperforming people for a long time. In 1997, he defeated grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess, winning his first competition.
AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence system from Google DeepMind, beat Lee Sedol, the world Go champion, in 2016. It did so by coming up with new moves that no one had seen before.
Experts say this new discovery is the first time AI has been used physically to hit a person.
Bi also said: “The AI robot beats the previously recorded fastest time, which was set by a highly skilled human player, by more than 6%.”
The team will soon share code and hardware information for the CyberRunner.
The work was written up in a document that was published on the preprint website arxiv.org.
Categories: Technology
Source: vtt.edu.vn