DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned deep learning company, has previously built machines that can master games like Go. What does it think is the next big frontier for machine intelligence? Mastering a cooperative card game about fireworks, called Hanabi. Here’s why it’s such a challenge.
The history of artificial intelligence is as much marked by what computers can’t do as what they can.
That’s not to say that the history of A. I. is a history of failure, but rather that, as a discipline, it has been driven forward in its quest for machine intelligence by a constant series of skeptical statements suggesting that “a computer will never do [insert feat here.]”
A computer will never be able to learn. A computer will never be able to play chess. A computer will never be able to win at the game show Jeopardy! A computer will never be any good at translating languages. A computer will never be able to drive a car. A computer will never be able to win at Go, or StarCraft, or Texas Hold ‘Em.
Time and again, our list of arbitrary tasks that a computer will never be able to do is proven wrong — usually by stubborn computer scientists doing it precisely because skeptics thought it couldn’t be done.
Jump forward to 2019, and tasks a computer will “never” be able to do look a bit thinner on the ground. We’ve got lawyer bots, able to dispense legal advice at a fraction the cost of flesh-and-blood lawyers. We’ve got robots that can execute the kind of parkour moves that would impress any action movie star. Heck, machines are even painting pictures that sell for big bucks at auction.
What’s left, then? The answer, at least according to researchers from the Alphabet-owned DeepMind Technologies and the University of Oxford, is “Hanabi.” If you’re confused, you’re not alone.
Hanabi, the Japanese word for fireworks, is a cooperative card game in which players work together to build up a series of cards in a specific order to set off a simulated fireworks show. The unique twist is that each player can see everyone’s cards but their own.
