One man’s a priori is another man’s a posteriori, one might say; there are many places one can acquire informative priors… Learning ‘tacit knowledge’ can be so fast as to look instantaneous. An example here would be OA’s Dactyl hand: it learns robotic hand manipulation in silico, using merely a model simulating physics, with a lot of randomization of settings to teach it to adapt on the fly, to whatever new model it finds itself in. This enables it to, without ever once training on an actual robot hand (only simulated ones), successfully run on an actual robot hand after seconds of adaptation. Another example might be PILCO: it can learn your standard “Cartpole” task within just a few trials by carefully building a Bayesian model and picking maximally informative experiments to run. (Cartpole is quite difficult for a human, incidentally, there’s an installation of one in the SF Exploratorium, and I just had to try it out once I recognized it. My sample-efficiency was not better than PILCO.) Because the Phites have all that computation and observations of the real world, they too can do similar tricks, and who knows what else we haven’t thought of.
One man’s a priori is another man’s a posteriori, one might say; there are many places one can acquire informative priors… Learning ‘tacit knowledge’ can be so fast as to look instantaneous. An example here would be OA’s Dactyl hand: it learns robotic hand manipulation in silico, using merely a model simulating physics, with a lot of randomization of settings to teach it to adapt on the fly, to whatever new model it finds itself in. This enables it to, without ever once training on an actual robot hand (only simulated ones), successfully run on an actual robot hand after seconds of adaptation. Another example might be PILCO: it can learn your standard “Cartpole” task within just a few trials by carefully building a Bayesian model and picking maximally informative experiments to run. (Cartpole is quite difficult for a human, incidentally, there’s an installation of one in the SF Exploratorium, and I just had to try it out once I recognized it. My sample-efficiency was not better than PILCO.) Because the Phites have all that computation and observations of the real world, they too can do similar tricks, and who knows what else we haven’t thought of.