JC Torres 

The holy grail of AI has always been to enable computers to learn the way humans do. The most powerful AIs today, however, still rely on having certain known rules, like rules for a game of chess or Go. Human learning, however, is often messy in inferential, learning the rules of life as we go. DeepMind has long been trying to create such AIs using games as their environment and test suite. Google’s sister company focusing on AI research has just revealed its latest achievement in MuZero, an AI that can master a game without learning the rules beforehand.

DeepMind’s previous AIs like AlphaGo have been widely covered in media for beating human champions in their respective games. Impressive as they may have been, they were still a few steps shy of the ultimate goal. AlphaGo, in particular, had the advantage of knowing not only the rules of Go but also domain knowledge and data from human players. Its successors, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero, could still bank on having the rule book to learn from.

While these AIs excelled in games with complex strategies but simple visuals, they failed when applied to more visually complex games where the rules are not so easy to infer. That’s where the new MuZero AI comes in and it uses a selection of Atari games, like Ms. Pac-Man, to test out their theory.

By B.N. Frank

McDonald’s restaurants are putting cameras in their dumpsters and trash containers in an effort to improve their recycling efforts and save money on waste collection.  Nordstrom department stores are doing this as well.

Jason Gates spends a lot of his time thinking about trash, and how we can generate less of it.

Since 2013 his San Francisco-based startup, Compology, has used cameras and artificial intelligence to monitor what’s thrown into dumpsters and trash containers at businesses such as McDonald’s restaurants and Nordstrom department stores. The point is to make sure dumpsters are actually full before they’re emptied and to stop recyclable materials like cardboard from being contaminated by other junk so it, too, doesn’t become waste.

“We’ve found that most businesses and people have the right intentions about recycling, but oftentimes they just don’t know what the proper way to recycle is,” Gates, CEO of Compology, told CNN Business’ Rachel Crane.

To help them do it correctly, Compology puts trash-monitoring cameras and sensors inside industrial waste containers. The cameras take photos several times each day and when the container is lifted for dumping. An accelerometer helps trigger the camera on garbage day.

AI software analyzes the images to figure out how full the container is and can also let a customer know when something is where it shouldn’t be, such as a bag of trash tossed into a dumpster filled with cardboard boxes for recycling. Gates said the company’s cameras can cut the amount of non-recyclable materials thrown in waste containers by as much as 80%.