Google's DeepMind AI gives robots the ability to dream - ExtremeTech

You might ask why AI "dreams" are necessary given that robots can already dominate humans in most games such as Chess and Go. To grasp this, it is necessary to differentiate between AIs that use supervised vs. unsupervised learning. Most of the impressive feats so far attained by AI have been made using supervised learning, in which organized "training data" is supplied by the programmers and the AI learns to detect patterns within the data. This is a fairly straightforward approach to teaching machines but decidedly not how humans learn. We use an approach more akin to what programmers call unsupervised learning in which the agent experiments on their own to determine how different courses of action affect their goals.