Mind has given details on Alpha. Gos final form a software system trained without human demonstrations, entirely from self play, with few handcrafted reward functions. The software, named Alpha. Go Zero, is able to beat all previous versions of itself and, at least based on ELO scores, develop a far greater Go capability than any other preceding system or recorded human. The most intriguing part of Alpha. Find and compare EDI software. Free, interactive tool to quickly narrow your choices and contact multiple vendors. A curated list of awesome Go frameworks, libraries and software. Go Zero is how rapidly it goes from nothing to something via self play. Open. AI observed a similar phenomena with the Dota 2 project, in which self play catapulted our system from sub human to super human in a few days. Read more here at the Deep. Mind blog. Love AI Have some spare CPUs Want some pre built AI algorithms Then Intel has a framework for youIntel has released Coach, an open source AI development framework. It does all the standard things youd expect like letting you define a single agent then run it on many separate environments with inbuilt analytics and visualization. It also provides support for Neon an AI framework developed by Intel following its acquisition of startup Nervana as well as the Intel optimized version of Tensor. Flow. Intel says its relatively easy to integrate new algorithms. Coach ships with 1. AI algorithms spread across policy optimization and value optimization approaches, including classics like DQN and Actor Critic, as well as newer ones like Distributional DQN and Proximal Policy Optimization. It also supports a variety of different simulation environments, letting developers test out approaches on a variety of challenges to protect against overfitting to a particular target domain. Good documentation as well. Read more about Coach and how it is designed here. Training simulated self driving cars and real RC trucks with conditional imitation learning Imitation learning is a technique used by researchers to get AI systems to improve their performance by imitating expert actions, usually by studying demonstration datasets. Intuitively, this seems like the sort of approach that might be useful for developing self driving cars the world has a lot of competent drivers so if we can capture their data and imitate good behaviors, we can potentially build smarter self driving cars. But the problem is that when driving a lot of information needed to make correct decisions is implicit from context, rather than made explicit through signage or devices like traffic lights. New research from Intel Labs, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, and the University of Barcelona, suggests one way around these problems conditional imitation learning. In conditional imitation learning you explicitly queue up different actions to imitate based on input commands, such as turn left, turn right, straight at the next intersection, and follow the road. By factoring in this knowledge the researchers show you can learn flexible self driving car policies that appear to generalize well as well. Adding in this kind of command structure isnt trivial in one experiment the researchers try to have the imitation learning policy factor the commands into its larger learning process, but this didnt work reliably as there was no guarantee the system would always perfectly condition on the commands. To fix this, the researchers structure the system so it is fed a list of all the possible commands it may encounter, and is told to initiate a new branch of itself for dealing with each command, letting it learn separate policies for things like driving forward, or turning left, etc. Results The system works well in the test set of simulated townes. It also does well on a one fifth scale remote controlled car deployed in the real world brand Traxxas Maxx, using an NVIDIA TX2 chip for onboard inference, and Holybro Pixhawk flight controller software to handle the command setting and inputs. Evocative AI of the week the paper includes a wryly funny description of what would happen if you trained expert self driving car policies without an explicit command structure. Moreover, even if a controller trained to imitate demonstrations of urban driving did learn to make turns and avoid collisions, it would still not constitute a useful driving system.