Robots fitted with AI developed by Google’s DeepMind have figured out how to play football. The miniature humanoid robots, which are about knee height, were able to make tackles, score goals and easily recover from falls when tripped. In order to learn how to play, AI researchers first used DeepMind’s state-of-the-art MuJoCo physics engine to train virtual versions of the robots in decades of match simulations. The simulated robots were rewarded if their movements led to improved performance, such as winning the ball from an opponent or scoring a goal. Once they were sufficiently capable of performing the basic skills, DeepMind researchers then transferred the AI into real-life versions of the bipedal bots, who were able to play one-on-one games of football against each other with no additional training required. “The trained soccer players exhibit robust and dynamic movement skills, such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more,” DeepMind noted in a blog post. “The agents also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. “Although the robots are inherently fragile, minor hardware modifications, together with basic regularisation of the behaviour during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way.” A paper detailing the research, titled ‘Learning agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning’, is currently under peer-review. Previous DeepMind research on football-playing AI has used different team set ups, increasing the number of players in order to teach simulated humanoids how to work as a team. The researchers say the work will not only advance coordination between AI systems, but also offer new pathways towards building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is of an equivalent or superiour level to humans. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity DeepMind boss says human-level AI is just a few years away Apple finally launches two professional apps on the iPad UK-based tech company claims quantum computing ‘breakthrough’

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Conspiracy theorists think that there is a hidden planet in out Solar System that will eventually destroy humanity. That's right, conspiracy theorists believe there is a secret ninth planet that was discovered by 19th-century astronomer Percival Lowell. The planet was given the name 'Planet X', also known as Nibiru, by Lowell, who believed the inhabitants of the planet made humans who we are today. Despite Lowell never actually seeing the mystery planet, he was convinced of its existence and left $1 million to fund research about the planet after he passed away in 1916. A hundred years later and all the money spent, it was concluded that the planet never existed. But this hasn't stopped conspiracy theorists from vowing to continue the search. With Caltech professors Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin even going as far as to co-author a paper suggesting the planet exists "I didn't have a particularly strong appreciation for just how difficult would be to find Planet Nine until I started looking together with Mike using telescopes," Professor Batygin told the BBC. "The reason it's such a tough search is because most astronomical surveys are not looking for a single thing." It was initially predicted that Planet X would bring about the end of the world in 2003, but it did not smash into Earth as had been suggested. In 2012 it was again predicted that the planet would collide with Earth at the end of the year, which I don't need to tell you, did not happen. Dr Scott Sheppard and Professor Chad Trujillo sought to explain a strange cluster of six small objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune back in 2014. They suggested that a large planet was lurking in the solar system, with Dr Sheppard saying: "These distant objects are like breadcrumbs leading us to Planet X. 'The more of them we can find, the better we can understand the outer Solar System and the possible plant that we think is shaping their orbits - a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the Solar System's evolution." Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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