9/01/2008 PERMALINK
Dazzling airshow confirms advance in bot 'apprenticeship learning' Stanford Computer Science Professor Andrew Ng (center) and his graduate students Pieter Abbeel (left) and Adam Coates have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables helicopters to learn entirely on their own how to perform difficult aerobatic stunts and then autonomous fly the stunts. The helicopters teach themselves to fly by watching the maneuvers of a radio control helicopter flown by a human pilot. The dazzling airshow is an impressive demonstration of what is called by AI researchers, apprenticeship learning, in which smart bots learn by observing an expert teacher, rather than by having to be coded with instruction by hand ... more