
Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning - seycombi
https://github.com/iassael/learning-to-communicate
======
taliesinb
I think it's really cool that these kinds of agent models are catching on in
the RL world, with this, and OpenAI's recent paper. And with
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03864](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03864) makes me
wonder how close we are to seeing deep learning resurrecting good ol' A-life.
If I may divert for a moment to wistfully recall an old project...

When I was a teen I read Steven Levy's book "Artifical Life". It captured my
imagination in a way that the biomorph program in a Blind Watchmaker also had.
Ever since then I've played with toy alife models. Some of the attraction is
just aesthetic - it's fun to set these things up and design the rules, kinda
like a higher-order god-game. Another is the enticing fantasy that something
like this will one day lead to AGI. A third is the occasionally fulfilled
desire to see the fabled emergent behavior of evolutionary computations, where
the agents learn to do something you never expected, or exploit some funky
loophole to their advantage.

When I was an undergrad I created an alife system as an honors project. It was
an ambitious project, with sexually or asexually reproducing agents controlled
by recurrent neural nets. The agents had perception and the ability to move,
reproduce, attack, co-operate, or interact with objects. It had an entity
framework to make it possible to design things like programmable Skinner
boxes, traps, feeders, it had feeding schedules, it had live visualization and
a slick Qt interface to edit the entities inline or take control of specific
agents and visualize their brains.

I was so proud of it.

My assigned supervisor, who was an austere Georgian category theorist, had
zero interest. He compared it unfavorably to a virus. Anyway, it was so
dispiriting an experience that I kind of swore off Alife after that. But the
fun I had made me realize I didn't want to be a mathematician, so I suppose it
played a useful role in my life after all.

~~~
amenod
I am sorry your supervisor was a jerk, your project sounds cool! And even if
it weren't cool, it was his job to make sure you stay motivated and keep
learning. He clearly failed catastrophically.

With latest developments in ML/AI space this is a very interesting period to
be living in. A few decades later they will probably say: "remember when there
was no artificial agents and the computers were those dumb boxes?" I hope you
find your way back and join the fun!

------
pebblexe
Reminds me of this: [https://fatiherikli.github.io/language-evolution-
simulation/](https://fatiherikli.github.io/language-evolution-simulation/)

~~~
ibgib
That readme is quite appropriate. That is just fun to watch.

