Researchers suggest AI can learn common sense from animals

AI researchers developing reinforcement learning agents could learn a lot from animals. In a decades-long venture to advance machine intelligence, the AI research community has often looked to neuroscience and behavioral science for inspiration and to better understand how intelligence is formed. But this effort has focused primarily on human intelligence, specifically that of babies and children. "This is especially true in a reinforcement learning context, where, thanks to progress in deep learning, it is now possible to bring the methods of comparative cognition directly to bear," the researchers' paper reads. "Animal cognition supplies a compendium of well-understood, nonlinguistic, intelligent behavior; it suggests experimental methods for evaluation and benchmarking; and it can guide environment and task design." DeepMind introduced some of the first forms of AI to combine deep learning and reinforcement learning, like the deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm, a system that played numerous Atari games at superhuman levels.