Machines can learn by simply observing

British researchers have discovered that it is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for.

The discovery, by researchers at the University of Sheffield, is inspired by the work of computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human.

In the test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.

The interrogator has to find out which of the two players is human. If they consistently fail to do so — meaning that they are no more successful than if they had chosen one player at random — the machine has passed the test, and is considered to have human-level intelligence.

Dr Roderich Gross from the department of automatic control and systems engineering and Sheffield Robotics at the University of Sheffield said, “Our study uses the Turing test to reveal how a given system, not necessarily a human, works”. “We put a swarm of robots under surveillance and wanted to find out which rules caused their movements. To do so, we put a second swarm — made of learning robots — under surveillance too.” The movements of all the robots were recorded and the motion data shown to interrogators. The discovery was published in the journal Swarm Intelligence.