Lifeboat Foundation

A blog by Jeff Atwood on programming and human factors.

Eric Kilhstrom (Director of Aging Analytics Agency and former Interim Director of the £98 million Healthy Ageing Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund) is interviewed about the agency’s recent “Longevity Industry in Israel Landscape Overview 2019” report.

New report shows that Israel’s academic and business ecosystem is the optimal base for an internationally recognized longevity industry hub.

Continue reading “Israel fast becoming world hub of aging industry” »

Hidden under your feet is an information superhighway that allows plants to communicate and help each other out. It’s made of fungus.

And they’re not the only big company turning to this “fun-gi” packaging.

This paper published in Nature on 26th February 2015, describes a DeepRL system which combines Deep Neural Networks with Reinforcement Learning at scale for the first time, and is able to master a diverse range of Atari 2600 games to superhuman level with only the raw pixels and score as inputs.

For artificial agents to be considered truly intelligent they should excel at a wide variety of tasks that are considered challenging for humans. Until this point, it had only been possible to create individual algorithms capable of mastering a single specific domain. With our algorithm, we leveraged recent breakthroughs in training deep neural networks to show that a novel end-to-end reinforcement learning agent, termed a deep Q-network (DQN), was able to surpass the overall performance of a professional human reference player and all previous agents across a diverse range of 49 game scenarios.

Starting from zero knowledge and without human data, AlphaGo Zero was able to teach itself to play Go and to develop novel strategies that provide new insights into the oldest of games.

The biggest rubik’s cube… ever, being solved by a computer.

Please watch the new updated video instead (unless you really enjoy YouTube’s AudioSwap music): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cedyW6JdsQ

Continue reading “1000 x 1000 x 1000 Rubik’s Cube Solve” »

DeepMind’s Professor David Silver describes AlphaGo Zero, the latest evolution of AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go. Zero is even more powerful and is arguably the strongest Go player in history.

Previous versions of AlphaGo initially trained on thousands of human amateur and professional games to learn how to play Go. AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, it quickly surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by 100 games to 0.

Continue reading “AlphaGo Zero: Discovering new knowledge” »

2017 NIPS Keynote by DeepMind’s David Silver. Dr. David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and is lead researcher on AlphaGo. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award.

Recorded: December 6th, 2017