
DeepMind Memory Task Suite - davidfoster
https://github.com/deepmind/dm_memorytasks
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PaulRobinson
I was surprised to see that these are based in Unity. Is there a growing
community of machine-learning research in Unity, and if so, what's prompting
that?

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glial
I saw these folks talk at a conference last year and demo some of this work.
There is a strong push towards asking computers to do tasks that humans and
animals do in psychology and neuroscience experiments: navigating a maze,
finding a platform submerged in water, etc. Many of these tasks require memory
(see also: playing Montezuma's Revenge). Part of the goal is to reach parity
with humans on certain tasks. Another part is to help understand how cognition
works by building it from scratch and cross-referencing results with
human/animal results.

By using Unity, they can create a virtual environment that mimics the real
physical experiments. I think this is good, as one big 'cheat' in many AI
projects is representing the 'state' of the system in a way that implicitly
captures expert domain knowledge - i.e. about what parts of the environment
are significant with regards to performing the task. Letting the agent
'experience' a virtual world in a 'raw' form allows _it_ to figure out what's
salient - what it needs to remember - which animals also have to do in
experiments.

Plus, Unity videos demo really well.

