ai Articles, Stories & News

From the OpenAI team: We're releasing the public beta of  OpenAI Gym , a toolkit for developing and comparing  reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. It consists of a growing suite of environments  (from  simulated robots  to  Atari  games), and a site for  comparing and reproducing  results. OpenAI Gym is compatible with algorithms written in any framework, such as Tensorflow  and  Theano . The environments are written in Python, but we'll soon make them easy to use from any language. We originally built OpenAI Gym as a tool to accelerate our own RL research. We hope it will be just as useful for the broader community.   Getting started:   If you'd like to dive in right away, you can work through our  tutorial ...  (full intro post)

From Ross Goodwin on Medium: To call the film above surreal would be a dramatic understatement. Watching it for the first time, I almost couldn’t believe what I was seeing—actors taking something without any objective meaning, and breathing semantic life into it with their emotion, inflection, and movement.  After further consideration, I realized that actors do this all the time. Take any obscure line of Shakespearean dialogue and consider that 99.5% of the audience who hears that line in 2016 would not understand its meaning if they read it in on paper. However, in a play, they do understand it based on its context and the actor’s delivery.  As Modern English speakers, when we watch Shakespeare, we rely on actors to imbue the dialogue with meaning. And that’s exactly what happened inSunspring, because the script itself has no objective meaning. On watching the film, many of my friends did not realize that the action descriptions as well as the dialogue were computer generated. After examining the output from the computer, the production team made an effort to choose only action descriptions that realistically could be filmed, although the sequences themselves remained bizarre and surreal... (medium article with technical details) Here is the stage direction that led to Middleditch’s character vomiting an eyeball early in the film: C (smiles) I don’t know anything about any of this. H (to Hauk, taking his eyes from his mouth) Then what? H2 There’s no answer.

From MIT: This week a postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) developed a Trump Twitterbot that Tweets out remarkably Trump-like statements, such as “I’m what ISIS doesn’t need.” The bot is based on an artificial-intelligence algorithm that is trained on just a few hours of transcripts of Trump’s victory speeches and debate performances... ... ( MIT article ) ( twitter feed )