Getting Machines to Learn Like Children

Our own experiments in the area of machine learning, or even recognizing trivial patterns and repeating them when needed, were far more simple.    Where does the challenge lie?

Growing a Mind in a Machine   By Bennie Mols  in CACM

"We are far from having any AI that can model the world as flexibly and as deeply as humans do, but we have at least one route to get there, and that is to reverse-engineer how these abilities work in the human mind and brain," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Josh Tenenbaum.

A man with a stack of papers in his hands walks towards a closed cupboard. In the corner of the room, an 18-month-old boy is watching the scene from a corner of the room. The man bumps to the cupboard, takes a few steps back, tries again, and bumps against the closed doors a second time. The little boy leaves the corner, walks to the cupboard, and opens both cupboard doors; then he looks up to the man, who again walks towards the cupboard. As the boy gazes at the bookshelves, the man places the stack of papers on one of the shelves.

The video described above, titled "Experiments with altruism in children and chimps," was created during a psychological experiment by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Josh Tenenbaum. He showed the video during his invited talk on "Building Machines that Learn and Think Like People" at IJCAI 2018, the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July.  .... "