Scientists have created artificial intelligence that can think and learn like a baby. The system is able to understand the basic common sense rules of the world in the same way that humans can.
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The discovery could not only help advance artificial intelligence research but also the ways in which we understand the human mind, scientists.
Children 's minds are of particular interest to artificial intelligence researchers, as they are able to understand rules and common sense in a way that remains largely mysterious. Researchers have suggested that computers could be successful in imitating this system, and that it might be better to simulate a child's brain and teach it rather than attempting to copy the functions of an adult.
One of their capabilities is “intuitive physics,” the knowledge we have about how things interact, from a young age. People know, for example, that a ball will fall to the floor if the person holding it lets go, and they realize this at a very young age, but it’s still not clear exactly how we do this.
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Artificial intelligence systems have struggled with such concepts, and even advanced computers can't understand these rules in the same way that a three-month-old baby can. But now scientists have created a new system that was able to learn a range of different physical concepts.
The deep learning system, called PLATO , was trained by watching objects interact in various ways: balls falling to the ground, rolling, and bouncing off each other, the scientists said.
To test this, they then showed the system videos containing improbable scenarios in which physics made no sense. The researchers then found that the system expressed its own surprise, in the same way that real babies.
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It was able to learn such physics in just 28 hours of video watching, the authors say.
The findings are reported in two new papers, “Intuitive physics learning in a deep learning model inspired by developmental psychology” and “Can a computer think like a baby?”, published in Nature Human Behaviour.
