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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

I understand the challenge, and the importance of the proof-of-principle. But again? Having done Atari games, then Go, at what point exactly does google deepmind start attacking some real world problems of consequence?

Or maybe the answer is never, other companies are supposed to do the hard work? We only play games?

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They are publicly working on medicine and energy problems. Games just happen to be a convenient place to do research.

https://deepmind.com/blog/putting-patients-heart-deepmind-he... https://deepmind.com/blog/applying-machine-learning-radiothe... https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-ce...

Machine learning is currently being used all over the place, in almost every single of Google's products.

Projects like these may have a "fun" goal, but while reaching towards that objective, a lot of new techniques and theory is developed, which then gets used in real products.

Systems like this are much easier to use as a playground and test in than the real world. But as they mention, the messiness and stateful nature of games like SC2 will bring a lot of innovation which will be very relevant to the real world.

What real world problems do you have in mind? Games are convenient because they can be easily simulated, and you can compare the performance to expert humans.

The reinforcement learning they work on is extremely general and can be applied to many other types of problems. Particularly robot control, which is sort of the same sort of task as a video game.

Solving toy problems in a limited domain is pretty important before you can tackle real world problems.

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