Risto Miikkulainen on evolutionary computation and making robots think for themselves

Subscribe to the O'Reilly Radar Podcast to track the technologies and people that will shape our world in the years to come: Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS In this week's episode, David Beyer, principal at Amplify Partners, co-founder of Chart.io, and part of the founding team at Patients Know Best, chats with Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. They chat about evolutionary computation, its applications in deep learning, and how it's inspired by biology. Also note, David Beyer's new free report "The Future of Machine Intelligence" is now available for download. We talk about evolutionary computation as a way of solving problems, discovering solutions that are optimal or as good as possible. In these complex domains like, maybe, simulated multi-legged robots that are walking in challenging conditions--a slippery slope or a field with obstacles--there are probably many different solutions that will work.