| I was pretty impressed by the result until reaching " a relatively simple search algorithm that searches through possible sets of rules". CNNs have done such impressive things that "outperforms convolutional neural nets" sounds like an achievement, but CNNs have never been the pinnacle of accuracy - their key advantage is flexibility. Feature learning costs some reliability, but gives a huge advantage in saving human time and effort. This appears to be exactly the opposite approach, an AI system that gains its accuracy by working from heavily pre-defined rulesets. Feature engineering is fine in a stable, well-understood domain, but it reduces the impressiveness of the 'AI' result. And more worryingly, it cripples the flexibility of the agent in a open domain like "video games". Hand-authoring a set of functions required to derive the model means embedding a huge portion of the game engine in the engine-learning framework - what's left to learn is basically just parameter values. Mario without powerups is a game entirely defined by 2D movement, collisions, animation, and a tracking camera. That's the same feature list that had to be hand-defined for the engine. I don't mean to attack the authors. This is still an interesting result, and they do acknowledge this in P2 of 'Limitations'. (Albeit with some lofty claims about eventually understanding real video - are they planning to encode physics as their ruleset?) But the article really oversells the capacity of a system that was spoon-fed the essentials of what it had to learn. |