Google AI Making Decisions on the Fly

Intriguing direction making decisions like we often do,  in a series to address changes in context

Google’s AI enables robots to make decisions on the fly
  By Kyle Wiggers in Venturebeat

In a paper published this week  (technical) on the preprint server Arxiv.org, a team of Google Brain; Google X; and University of Calfornia, Berkeley researchers describe an extension to existing AI methods that enable an agent — for instance, a robot — to decide which action to take while performing a previous action. The idea is that modeling an agent’s behavior after that of a person or an animal will lead to more robust, less failure-prone systems in the future.

The researchers point out that while AI algorithms have achieved success in video games, robotic grasping, and manipulation tasks, most use a blocking observe-think-act paradigm — an agent assumes that its environment will remain static while it “thinks” so that its actions will be executed on the same states from which they were computed. This holds true in simulation but not in the real world, where the environment state evolves as the agent processes observations and plans its next actions. ...."