Students Talked to This AI Until It Learned to Play an Atari 2600

If you've ever had a sibling that plays video games, this should be a familiar scene: they're playing the game, and you're sitting beside them on the floor, shoving Doritos into your face by the handful. You're also shouting, "UP! OK, NOW GO DOWN! NO, DOWN! WATCH OUT FOR THAT GUY BEHIND YOU!" Maybe, just maybe, you'll beat the game together. This is essentially how undergraduate students at Stanford University recently taught AI to play a notoriously challenging game, Montezuma's Revenge for the Atari 2600. These fledgling computer scientists hope that this approach could one day be used to allow advanced robots and AI to learn how about the real world from average schmoes like me in the future. "Everyone in the developed world is interacting with AI every day, whether they know it or not," said Russell Kaplan, a Stanford computer science student and one of the study's co-authors, in an interview.