The smartphone video game Flappy Bird[1] was removed from smartphones in 2014 by its creator, Dong Nguyen, because it was too addictive. But the program lives on as an inspiration to deep learning researchers.
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Specifically, International Business Machines scientists this week unveiled research into how machines can continually learn tasks, including playing Flappy Bird, improving over time rather than learning one level of play and stopping at that.
Known as lifelong learning, or continuous learning, the area has been studied for decades but remains a formidable research challenge.
Aside from offering an important new tool for AI, the work is something of a meditation on what it means for learning to take place both forward and backward in time.
Flappy Bird was one of their chief tests. In that game, you have to fly the little animated bird safely through a collection of pillars. The IBM researchers defined each change in the aspect of the game, such as the height of the pillars, as a novel task. Neural networks then have to extrapolate from one task to the next by maximizing what has already been learned in prior tasks.
Called Meta-experience replay, or MER, the work is a bit of a mash-up between a