What Google DeepMind Means for A.I.
"video games" (read "world simulator").<p>The important thing about their work is that it is deliberately marching down the path of more and more complex world simulations.<p>We experience the world at one second per second. To learn to walk we must first fall, and we fall at 32 feet/second^2. There's a hard limit on how fast we can make mistakes (like tripping) and so there is a hard limit on how fast we can learn.<p>Computers can experience a simulated world at many hours per second. When they're learning to walk in a simulated world they can fail, and learn, thousands of times before we've finished our first step.<p>This ratio of simulated experience to real world time is also going up. Eventually the minimum amount of time it takes to grow a toddler like AI in simulation will be just under the time an AI researcher is willing to wait for results. When <i>that</i> happens we'll see a real improvement in the quality of AIs.