Lessons in life from an ai agent

I’ve always been passionate about data and the way it can help drive our businesses forward. A few years ago I took the next logical step with a deep dive into ai.

It was part of my personal programme of smashing myself into new ideas (a key ingredient in our ability to innovate on demand).

I talked to data scientists, read books and blogs, watched YouTube and listened to podcasts. One of the you-tubers I enjoyed was a guy called Siraj and about two years ago, he put out a video tutorial about Re-enforcement Learning. I loved his crazy style and he inspired me to have a go.

Because I wanted to learn as much as I could, I decided to ignore his advice about using a pre-built world in python and just build everything from scratch in JavaScript.

I’m also very interested behavioral analysis and as I watched the agent live out its life in my artificial world, I found it completely fascinating. In many ways I found a connection between the trade offs needed within the Ai model and some conscious or unconscious decisions that I’ve made in my own life.

I suspect many of us are making similar choices and I thought it could make an interesting topic for a video and blog. I wanted to try and illustrate how some of those decisions can affect the outcomes for an Ai agent who wants to achieve a particular goal.

I hoped that by crystallizing that trade off and demonstrating the impact in an alternate reality, it might help us all make some of those choices more consciously more of the time.

The video is here and it’s 14 minutes long:

With this link to one of my personal gitHub pages, you can see the Ai Agent and control his life choices yourself. The obstacles and death zones are generated randomly each time .

The simple rules by which the agent lives his life allow him to learn from experience and solve quite challenging problems. Although I didn’t cover this in my video, I also designed a maze where one wrong step leads to death and then I set the Ai agent loose to learn the solution. There were more life lessons from that exercise but it’s a longer story.

If you’re interested in learning more about Ai and thinking how it can help solve some of the problems or capitalize on opportunities in your business, please give me a call.