Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers
with Károly Zsolnai-Fehér.
Today, I am really excited to show you four
experiments where AI researchers were baffled
by the creativity and unexpected actions of
their own creations.
You better hold on to your papers.
In the first experiment, robots were asked
to walk around while minimizing the amount
of foot contact with the ground.
Much to the scientists' surprise, the robots
answered that this can be done with 0% contact,
meaning that they never ever touch the ground
with the feet.
The scientists wondered how that is even possible,
and pulled up a video of the proof.
This proof showed a robot flipping over and
walking using its elbows.
Talk about thinking outside the box!
Wow.
A different robot arm experiment also came
to a surprising conclusion.
At first, the robot arm had to use its grippers
to grab a cube, which it successfully learned
to perform.
However, in a later experiment, the gripper
was crippled, making the robot unable to open
its fingers.
Scientists expected a pathetic video with
the robot to push the box around and always
failing to pick up the cube.
Instead, they have found this.
You see it right, instead of using the fingers,
the robot finds the perfect angle to smash
the hand against the box to force the gripper
to open and pick up the box.
That is some serious dedication to solving
the task at hand.
Bravo!
In the next experiment, a group of robots
were tasked to find food and avoid poisonous
objects in an environment, and were equipped
with a light and no further instructions.
First, they learned to use the lights to communicate
the presence of food and poison to each other
and cooperate.
This demonstrates that when trying to maximize
the probability of the survival of an entire
colony, the concept of communication and cooperation
can emerge even from simple neural networks.
Absolutely beautiful.
And what is even more incredible, is that
later, when a new reward system was created
that fosters self-preservation, the robots
learned to deceive each other by lighting
up the the food signal near the poison to
take out their competitors and increase their
chances.
And these behaviors emerge from a reward system
and a few simple neural networks.
Mind blowing.
A different AI was asked to fix a faulty sorting
computer program.
Soon, it achieved a perfect score without
changing anything because it noticed that
by short circuiting the program itself, it
always provides an empty output.
And of course, you know, if there are no numbers,
there is nothing to sort.
Problem solved.
Make sure to have a look at the paper, there
are many more experiments that went similarly,
including a case where the AI found a bug
in a physics simulation program to get an
edge.
With AI research improving at such a rapid
pace, it is clearly capable of things that
surpasses our wildest imagination, but we
have to make sure to formulate our problems
with proper caution, because the AI will try
to use loopholes instead of common sense to
solve them.
When in a car chase, don't ask the car AI
to unload all unnecessary weights to go faster,
or if you do, prepare to be promptly ejected
from the car.
If you have enjoyed this episode, please make
sure to have a look at our Patreon page in
the video description where you can pick up
really cool perks, like early access to these
videos or getting your name shown in the video
description, and more.
Thanks for watching and for your generous
support, and I'll see you next time!
