[gregdeon]

I watched the talk live. I felt that his main argument was that Atari _looks_ solved, but there's still plenty of value that could be gained by revisiting these "solved" games. For one, learning how to play games through a physical interface is a way to start engaging with the kinds of problems that make robotics hard (e.g., latency). They're also a good environment to study catastrophic forgetting: an hour of training on one game shouldn't erase a model's ability to play other games.

I think we could eventually saturate Atari, but for now it looks like it's still a good source of problems that are just out of reach of current methods.

[koolala]

Is a highly specialized bespoke robot for a Atari controller really that different? If anyone cared about latency they could have added it to the emulated controls and video with random noise.

[gregdeon]

I think it is. Latency was just one of the problems he described. A physical controller sometimes adds "phantom inputs" as the joystick transitions between two inputs. Physical actuators also slow down with wear. A physical Atari-playing robot needs to learn qualitatively different strategies that are somewhat more robust to these problems. Emulators also let the bot take as much time as it needs between frames, which is much easier than playing in real time. To me, all of this makes a physical robot seem like a decent way to start engaging with problems that come up in robotics but not simulated games.