Still, Murphy's Mario solver highlights a larger question, often neglected: Could anyone, ever, build an A.I. system that might match a human being in the sheer flexibility of learning new tasks?
Allow the newly hired employee some latitude in setting the pace of learning new tasks, particularly when the training is provided by numerous employees who must perform their duties as well as train the new hire.
Although Hofstadter and Sander overstate their case (not everything depends on analogy) and never provide an explicit algorithm, it does seem plausible that analogy is one of the most powerful tools that a ten-year-old has in his (or her) mental toolkit for learning new tasks, like a new sport or a new video game.
In these cases, imitation occurs via automatic processes, whereas examples of voluntary imitation are experienced daily while learning new tasks (learning by imitation [3]).
Allow question and answer sessions for learning new tasks.
Rosie is a tabletop robot implemented in the Soar architecture that learns new tasks from online interactive language instruction.
You can actually see this phase shift take place in f.M.R.I.'s of subjects as they learn new tasks: the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active, and other parts of the brain take over.
In this article, a hybrid assembly station is presented, in which an industrial robot can learn new tasks from worker instructions.
Prof Eleanor Maguire, who led the study, said: "The human brain remains 'plastic', even in adult life, allowing it to adapt when we learn new tasks.
