How do some of the best AI algorithms perform on real robots? Not well, it turns out

All the biggest labs leading AI research will have you believe that their fancy game-playing software bots will one day be applicable to the real world. The skills from playing Go, Poker or Dota 2 will be transferable to algorithms designing new drugs, controlling robots, teaching computers how to negotiate – you name it. One startup, Kindred.AI, decided to put some of those claims to the test, particularly with respect to robotics and machine-learning software. "We wanted to know the readiness of the state-of-the-art RL algorithms on real robotic applications," Rupam Mahmood, lead of AI at Kindred, told The Register. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular AI method that teaches agents how to perform a specific task by rewarding them every time they get closer to the stated goal.