teaching

A Fools Mate

It's all very well AI's learning how to play games from humans and then besting us. From chess to Go and the whole canon of Atari videogames.

Today they play within the confines of the game and follow the rules able to think many more moves ahead. However, what about when they begin to improve their chess game by learning from medieval siege techniques or use quantum theory to wipe the floor with us in Grand Theft Auto?

Transfer learning is one of the next upswings for Machine Learning. It is where machine learning stores knowledge from solving one problem (like playing chess) and applies it to a different but related problem (like thermonuclear global warfare).

The next few years will be straightforward - knowledge gained from driving cars applied to trucks or knowledge about marine algae propagation applied to skin problem diagnosis.

But as the years roll by more distant domains will come together. City planning and biology, painting and psychology, the construction of concertos applied to the arcs of our lives and careers.  

We will show AI how to learn one game but it will come to invent another one entirely.