How teaching AI to be curious helps machines learn for themselves

When playing a video game, what motivates you to carry on? This question is perhaps too broad to yield a single answer, but if you had to sum up why you accept that next quest, jump into a new level, or cave and play just one more turn, the simplest explanation might be "curiosity" -- just to see what happens next. And as it turns out, curiosity is a very effective motivator when teaching AI to play video games, too. Research published this week by artificial intelligence lab OpenAI explains how an AI agent with a sense of curiosity outperformed its predecessors playing the classic 1984 Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Becoming skilled at Montezuma's Revenge is not a milestone equivalent to beating Go or Dota 2, but it's still a notable advance.