A tweet in my timeline early today from Joshua Conkel, a writer and director in Los Angeles, caught my eye.I want a Knives Out movie where Benoit and his husband are on a vacation together and B

Practising and honing skills forms a fundamental component of how humans learn, yet artificial agents are rarely specifically trained to perform them. Instead, they are usually trained end-to-end, with the hope being that useful skills will be implicitly learned in order to maximise discounted return of some extrinsic reward function. In this paper, we investigate how skills can be incorporated into the training of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in complex environments with large state-action spaces and sparse rewards. To this end, we created SkillHack, a benchmark of tasks and associated skills based on the game of NetHack. We evaluate a number of baselines on this benchmark, as well as our own novel skill-based method Hierarchical Kickstarting (HKS), which is shown to outperform all other evaluated methods. Our experiments show that learning with a prior knowledge of useful skills can significantly improve the performance of agents on complex problems. We ultimately argue that utilising predefined skills provides a useful inductive bias for RL problems, especially those with large state-action spaces and sparse rewards.

Phil Foglio, co-creator of the amazing Girl Genius comics, writes, "We are Kickstarting our latest Girl Genius collection; City of Lightning through April 12." "In this volume, we take Agatha to Paris, and begin to explore the complicated subterranean civilizations that honeycomb the earth beneath Europa. As always, we deal with assorted scientific ethical and philosophical conundrums regarding the nature of artificial intelligence, the impact of sudden technological advances upon established Geo-political structures, ramifications of endowing animals with human intelligence, and the unintended consequences of unsupervised bio-weapons. They always are, and the Foglios always deliver on their kickstarters, making this a sure bet.