Robots fitted with AI developed by Google’s DeepMind have figured out how to play football. The miniature humanoid robots, which are about knee height, were able to make tackles, score goals and easily recover from falls when tripped. In order to learn how to play, AI researchers first used DeepMind’s state-of-the-art MuJoCo physics engine to train virtual versions of the robots in decades of match simulations. The simulated robots were rewarded if their movements led to improved performance, such as winning the ball from an opponent or scoring a goal. Once they were sufficiently capable of performing the basic skills, DeepMind researchers then transferred the AI into real-life versions of the bipedal bots, who were able to play one-on-one games of football against each other with no additional training required. “The trained soccer players exhibit robust and dynamic movement skills, such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more,” DeepMind noted in a blog post. “The agents also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. “Although the robots are inherently fragile, minor hardware modifications, together with basic regularisation of the behaviour during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way.” A paper detailing the research, titled ‘Learning agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning’, is currently under peer-review. Previous DeepMind research on football-playing AI has used different team set ups, increasing the number of players in order to teach simulated humanoids how to work as a team. The researchers say the work will not only advance coordination between AI systems, but also offer new pathways towards building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is of an equivalent or superiour level to humans. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity DeepMind boss says human-level AI is just a few years away Apple finally launches two professional apps on the iPad UK-based tech company claims quantum computing ‘breakthrough’

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Former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes may have again stalled the date by which she must report to prison by filing another appeal of her fraud conviction. Holmes was convicted by a federal jury of defrauding Theranos investors last year and was sentenced in November to just more than 11 years in prison. Holmes’s attorneys asked that she be allowed to remain free on bail while she appeals her conviction, but a judge declined that request and ordered her to report to prison on April 27. Now, though, it seems the disgraced tech star might not have to begin her prison sentence until June at the earliest. On Monday, her attorney filed a new motion of appeal of her conviction — after which Holmes was granted an immediate stay of her prison-report date, according to NBC Bay Area. The state has 21 days to respond to the appeal, after which Holmes’s defence team will have a further three weeks to file a final motion. After the final motion is filed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will consider her legal fate. The appeal filed this week is considered a longshot, but while that process is ongoing it is believed that Ms Holmes will remain free unless a judge orders her to report to prison. Holmes was back in the news last week after The New York Times published a long-form profile of her that was panned by a number of readers for its tone and credulity. Some critics, including the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, noted that Black people convicted of felonies are rarely given the same space to pitch their reformations to the media that the profile gave Holmes. Much of the article focused in part on Holmes as a mother. The former CEO gave birth to her first child in 2021 and her second child sometime around the beginning of 2023. Holmes’s former romantic partner and business partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani was sentenced to just under 13 years in prison on conspiracy and fraud counts for his role in the Theranos situation. He began serving his prison sentence last month. Read More Elizabeth Holmes says actors are playing a ‘character I created’ in dramatisations of her downfall Elizabeth Holmes says she’s working on new inventions but admits ‘mistakes’ in first interview post trial OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI can go ‘quite wrong’ Regulation ‘critical’ to curb risk posed by AI, boss of ChatGPT tells Congress Sam Altman testifies before Congress saying there is ‘urgent’ need for regulation