Reasoning About the World

DeepMind’s neural network teaches AI to reason about the world   By Matt Reynolds

THE world is a confusing place, especially for an AI. But a neural network developed by UK artificial intelligence firm DeepMind could help bring it into focus by giving computers the ability to understand how different objects are related to each other.

Humans use this type of inference – called relational reasoning – all the time, whether we are choosing the best bunch of bananas at the supermarket or piecing together evidence from a crime scene. The ability to transfer abstract relations – such as whether something is to the left of another object or bigger than it – from one domain to another gives us a powerful mental toolkit with which to understand the world. It is a fundamental part of our intelligence, says Sam Gershman, a computational neuroscientist at Harvard University.

What’s intuitive for humans is very difficult for machines to grasp, however. It is one thing for an AI to learn how to perform a specific task, such as recognising what’s in an image. But transferring know-how learned via image recognition is a big challenge. Machines capable of such versatility will be one step closer to general intelligence, the kind that lets humans excel at so many activities.... "