DeepMind's 'Plato' is an AI That Can Learn 'Intuitive Physics' Like a Baby

Google's AI subsidiary DeepMind is planning to unravel the capability between human and artificial intelligence regarding cognition.

The team created a special AI that can learn intuitive physics like a human infant. In doing so, the scientists could deeply study how babies pick up intuition at an early age.

An AI That Can Gain Intuition Like Human Baby

It's surprising how computer scientists arrived at their findings regarding an AI that acts like a baby. The team was curious to know how it feels to see a child behave around the objects that he/she sees.

According to Nature.com, the researchers have collaborated with a known AI firm, DeepMind, to construct a neural network capable of establishing learning on "intuitive physics."

The so-called AI, PLATO or Physics Learning Through Auto-encoding and Tracking Objects, might sound common to others, especially those who knew a famous Greek philosopher who existed around 427 B.C.E.

This scientist is widely-known for his discovery of atomic theory. He based the structures of the atoms on four basic elements on the planet including water (icosahedron), air (octahedron), fire (tetrahedron), and earth (cube).

According to the authors, Plato has been a useful tool to compare how a human baby gains intuition. In this way, they could compare two different entities, thus addressing the gap between machines and people.

Intuitive Physics in Simpler Terms

As per CNET, intuitive physics is best explained when you show a particular object like toys or pillows to a baby. At first, we assumed that babies would be shocked after seeing them. There might be some questions in their minds, including the ball's location or if they really existed in the first place.

After a brief moment, they would eventually realize the existence of an object. Although they could not see it clearly, they knew that it was placed at a specific location.

Of course, when you don't see an item from your spot, you will assume that it's not there. To bring Plato to the research, scientists have studied a lot of previous studies about developmental psychology.

In short, human infants begin to keep in touch with intuitive physics when they start observing the movement of things around them. These include the time when they interact and conclude how an object behaves.

To better understand it, Luis Piloto and his team created PLATO so they could have a more insightful experiment for the datasets. Moreover, the researchers presented a lot of animated clips to PLATO, and all of them are about physics. The total run time of all videos is 28 hours.

To their surprise, PLATO used intuitive physics even for some things it hasn't seen yet. To make it more interesting, they found out that the AI accurately predicted the next possible event that would happen after it picked up an intuition.

"We leveraged a subset of another synthetic dataset developed by researchers at MIT. This dataset also probes physical knowledge, but it has different visual appearances, and importantly, a set of objects that PLATO has never seen," Piloto said.

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Written by Joseph Henry