Forget chess, DeepMind's training its new AI to play football

Researchers from DeepMind, the UK's juggernaut AI lab, have forsaken the noble games of chess and Go for a more plebeian delight: football. The Google sister company yesterday published a research paper and accompanying blog post detailing its new neural probabilistic motor primitives (NPMP) -- a method by which artificial intelligence agents can learn to operate physical bodies. An NPMP is a general-purpose motor control module that translates short-horizon motor intentions to low-level control signals, and it's trained offline or via RL by imitating motion capture (MoCap) data, recorded with trackers on humans or animals performing motions of interest. Up front: Essentially, the DeepMind team created an AI system that can learn how to do things inside of a physics simulator by watching videos of other agents performing those tasks. And, of course, if you've got a giant physics engine and an endless supply of curious robots, the only rational thing to do is to teach it how to dribble and shoot: We optimized teams of agents to play simulated football via reinforcement learning, constraining the solution space to that of plausible movements learned using human motion capture data. Background: In order to train AI to operate and control robots in the world, researchers have to prepare the machines for reality.