
Whence your reward function? - argonaut
http://nlpers.blogspot.com/2016/12/whence-your-reward-function.html
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danielvf
This is an excellent article with a great point.

However, I don't think it's a bad next step to train AI's to play game.

Even though games lack several of the difficulties of real world tasks,
playing them well is just beyond our current capabilities. It is good to
successively solve hard problems, rather than wait for the perfect unified
answer to everything thing.

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new299
This video of a Super Mario playing AI was pretty neat:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44)

It may, or may not be on a useful path to solving harder AI problems. I don't
know. But it's a good way of demonstrating value (and publishing papers).

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wodenokoto
The article doesn't really focus on algorithms, but rather reward functions.
In this case, the evolutionary algorithm has a reward function that tells it
which mutations are most useful and therefore should be used to generate new
mutations.

This reward function is essentially the same no matter if you do normal
reinforcement learning or evolutionary.

