
Stanford's "autonomous" helicopters teach themselves to fly - chaostheory
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/september10/helicopter-091008.html
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neilc
_As Oku repeated a maneuver several times, the trajectory of the helicopter
inevitably varied slightly with each flight. But the learning algorithms
created by Ng's team were able to discern the ideal trajectory the pilot was
seeking. Thus the autonomous helicopter learned to fly the routine better—and
more consistently—than Oku himself._

This is incredibly cool work -- it's clear how this is a more general approach
than hard-coding a bunch of rules about how to fly a particular helicopter,
under particular assumptions about the environment and the desired maneuvers.

In the future, I wonder if it would be possible to improve the learning
algorithms to the point that no human expert is even needed: you could toss
the helicopter up in the air, and have it essentially figure out how to fly
the machine before it hit the ground.

This work is also a nice counterpoint to those who question the value of the
work being done in academic computer science. I think there is more innovation
and long-term value in these sorts of projects than in a dozen typical Web 2.0
social networking startups.

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froo
I completely agree - theres only so many ways one can "connect" with another
individual and keep up with their day to day lives.

Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, ad nauseum.

I think it's great to see more people try and tackle problems that have scope
in the real world beyond satisfying some teen's "social life"

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gaika
I wonder if machine learning can be used to enhance the way people "connect"
with others... Oh wait, that's my startup :)

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schtog
Start leaning from the guy right now:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxYlbK2c7E>

Stanford class on machine learning by Andrew Ng, 20 lectures.

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Eliezer
For those of you wondering if you should be impressed, the answer is yes.

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jobeirne
Live demonstration of the copter: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JL04JJjocc>

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froo
All they need to do now is make them a little larger, attach a minigun and
some missiles and Skynet will be able to hunt us down quite proficiently...

... while doing loop-to-loops.

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daniel-cussen
If something looked _that_ awesome while it was trying to kill me, I would let
it.

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ALee
Didn't sam altman of Loopt work on this project early on?

