Homer Simpson defeats Google's all-powerful DeepMind artificial intelligence

D'oh! You'd never believe it, but in a new research paper, computer scientists at Google DeepMind have admitted that its artificial intelligence technology still struggles to identify many common human behaviours that Homer Simpson exhibits – whether it's eating doughnuts or crisps, falling on his face, yawning or drinking beer. To try to get the DeepMind AI neural network to understand and recognise human behaviour, researchers created a huge dataset of over 300,000 YouTube video clips showing human actions. While none of the clips actually featured Homer Simpson, many of the foods, actions and behaviours the system was unable to recognise bore a striking pattern to the animated character's ways, which the researchers had a little fun with. They also enlisted online workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to look at common types of human behaviour and break it down into a labelled guide containing 400 human action classes, ranging from everything from "brushing hair" to "riding a unicycle" to "playing a violin", with each class corresponding to at least 400 video clips. When the Kinetics dataset was complete, the researchers then began training the neural network to recognise human actions – a machine learning technique known as "supervised learning".