Why Setting A Benchmark For Physical Reasoning In AI Matters

The machines of the modern world can now be taught how to learn, adapt and improvise with great tact. Asking a robot to run, do a cartwheel or throw a pitch would have sounded like a chapter from a generic sci-fi novel a few years ago. But now with the advancements in hardware acceleration and the optimisation of machine learning algorithms, techniques like Reinforcement Learning are being put into practical use. Hard coding a robot to perform even mundane skills poorly will take a lot of computational heavy lifting. However, it takes some ingenious constraint assumption to make the robot perform decently when put under unstructured, real-world situations.