
Holodeck – A High Fidelity Simulator for Reinforcement Learning - HIP_HOP
https://pcc.cs.byu.edu/2018/10/04/introducing-holodeck/
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givinguflac
I read the article but I don’t understand what the end goal is here. Are they
training game AI? Can someone help me understand what this is for?

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w1nt3rmu4e
Synthetic training data. Sometimes it's cheaper / safer / easier to work with
simulated data rather than real world sensor data. For some types of machine
learning, a simulation is "real enough".

Someone asked me to build a startup doing the same. His most convincing use
case was training camera systems to detect people falling overboard on cruise
ships, etc. It's impractical / dangerous to use real world camera data for
that.

There are other advantages, e.g., being able to generate simulations where
everything is already labeled.

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joelthelion
Images don't look that realistic, they have a marked video-gamy look. I wonder
how well stuff learned in this environment transfers to the real world.

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singularity2001
I was going to argue the opposite that such high fidelity images are not
really necessary to learn basic behaviour, in fact they look like overkill to
me

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mrieck
Yeah image quality is irrelevant for training... but physics do. I was hoping
they would have ultra-realistic physics engine.

Like have X amount of force applied to a ball in simulation and real-world and
then watch as the simulation perfectly matches how the real world ball bounces
around. That would be impressive. Instead it doesn't seem as they're adding
that much more to a game engine other than a couple robot characters.

