Google DeepMind's AI learns to play with physical objects

Push it, pull it, break it, maybe even give it a lick. Children experiment this way to learn about the physical world from an early age. Now, artificial intelligence trained by researchers at Google's DeepMind and the University of California, Berkeley, is taking its own baby steps in this area. "Many aspects of the world, like'Can I sit on this?' or'Is it squishy?' are best understood through experimentation," says DeepMind's Misha Denil. In a paper currently under review, Denil and his colleagues have trained an AI to learn about the physical properties of objects by interacting with them in two different virtual environments.