In the last year I decided that I wanted to learn more about robot control. It’s a well known fact that AI and robotics control are going to be a big thing in the next 5 to 10 years.

Part of my journey was to get involved with reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning has had some huge wins in the last few years, for example AlphaGo, Playing Atari games and beating professional players in DOTA2.

I decided I REALLY wanted to get involved! I built a few simple models, played with OpenAI Gym and experimented with taking the game connect 4 into any number of dimensions and then using Deep Q Learning to play it against itself.

However my experience told me there were a few things that were missing, and I wanted to make it better:

Competitiveness was on paper — Online competitive algorithm gaming tools such as Kaggle, OpenAI Gym and HackerRank only give you a score based on your mathematical performance of a certain environment or challenge. I wanted something more tangible, I want to see my algorithm in action against others! I really don’t like reading papers. YAWN.

Online competitive algorithm gaming tools such as Kaggle, OpenAI Gym and HackerRank only give you a score based on your mathematical performance of a certain environment or challenge. I wanted something more tangible, I want to see my algorithm in action against others! I really don’t like reading papers. YAWN. Competitions are not real time — There are a handful of algorithmic game competitions out there, but they are inconvenient to watch. You have to create a game and then wait for other’s to join. You can’t just start playing straight away.

There are a handful of algorithmic game competitions out there, but they are inconvenient to watch. You have to create a game and then wait for other’s to join. You can’t just start playing straight away. I want to show off my “pet” solutions to other people — I wanted this to be super convenient … why not stream it live to anyone who wants to watch? Maybe there’s a recruiter you can impress, or you want to explain a particular algorithmic process to a non-technical friend? Your friend probably hates reading papers too.

I wanted this to be super convenient … why not stream it live to anyone who wants to watch? Maybe there’s a recruiter you can impress, or you want to explain a particular algorithmic process to a non-technical friend? Your friend probably hates reading papers too. I want to watch AIs solving problems — Now this might seem a bit strange, but me and hundreds of thousands of users of Twitch and YouTube like to watch AIs solving problems, whether there are trashing human players at Go, or pitifully trying to drive cars in GTA 5.

I also had a few thoughts about what this kind of platform might potentially achieve given the right environments and users, for example:

AIs that are in competition with each other produce “super human” solutions — We know that we can produce AI game players that are far better than humans at playing games. AlphaGo Zero for example has beaten the best human and algorithmic players at both Go and Chess.

We know that we can produce AI game players that are far better than humans at playing games. AlphaGo Zero for example has beaten the best human and algorithmic players at both Go and Chess. AIs and algorithms playing games could be an E-Sport — Why not create superstars out of the best individuals and teams of algorithm and ML researchers?

Robot control is hard and at times tedious. Lets make it fun!

I am looking for 30–40 beta testers to provide feedback on the platform and the beta environment “Andromeda”. help create more innovative environments for bots to compete!

Introducing embod.ai

Think of embod.ai as a platform for Massively Multiplayer Online Game, but purpose built for algorithms to play, rather than people.

Think of this… algorithms do not need to sleep, they can consistently rack up points, improve themselves over time. Some of the test bots I have built have been running for several days non-stop. You can train your models for a few hours or days… then run them indefinitely. Then visit and watch what they are doing at any time.

In the near future, depending on what the community wants, we may do competitions and leagues. Maybe even allow trading or betting on particular models rise and demise :)

Let’s take a look at the beta Environment “Andromeda“