Google is Teaching A.I. How to Travel Through Cities Like a Human

Navigating familiar areas like the streets of your childhood neighborhood is less about carrying around a map and more about remembering what's around the corner. This comes almost naturally to humans and animals, but can a computer learn to walk the streets of New York City the same way? A team of computer scientists at the tech company's artificial intelligence wing, DeepMind, have developed an A.I. that can travel city streets by simply exploring them on foot. The group exclusively used images from Google Street View to turn their A.I. into a bonafide city slicker by just setting it loose in picture renditions of cities like Paris, London, and NYC. "The task of navigation can be solved by answering two questions," Piotr Mirowski, first author of this research, tells Inverse. And how do you get to where you want to go?