MIT Engineers Make Computers Learn Language By Playing "Civilization"

For over a decade, engineers at MIT have been working on projects to make computers learn the meaning of words on their own - without human intervention. The problem is very complex but latest experiments have shown encouraging results. The researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have obtained surprisingly good results from their machine learning systems.

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Computer Learns Language To Play Civilization Game | Image courtesy of Sid Meier's Civilization V

Back in 2009, researchers in the Regina Barzilay, associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering won the best paper award at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The paper described a system that generated scripts for installing a software on Windows PC, just by reading the instructions displayed on Microsoft help website. This year, Barzilay and her students S. R. K. Branavan and David Silver of University College London used a similar approach to solve a more complicated problem. They made the computer to play popular computer game 'Civilization' by reading the game manual. The game requires the player to build an empire from a city across multiple centuries. The computer showed improved rate of victory at 80%.

It's important to note that games do not have a determined output at every step, which makes the problem more complex. Therefore the system needs to be capable of handling random outputs and react in random, intelligent ways. Barzilay says, "game manuals have “very open text. They don’t tell you how to win. They just give you very general advice and suggestions, and you have to figure out a lot of other things on your own.”.

The main aim of this project is to demonstrate that computers can learn meanings of words through explanatory interaction with the environments. The engineers are now working on using their system in robotics to produce smarter robots.f

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