OpenAI trained a five-fingered robotic hand to unscramble the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, bringing both acclaim and criticism. The AI research lab OpenAI trained a mechanical hand to balance, twist, and turn the cube.

Every home is different. That makes it difficult for domestic robots to translate skills learned in one household into another. Training in virtual reality, where the robot has access to rich information about three-dimensional objects, can make it easier to generalize skills to the real world.

Independent research lab OpenAI designed virtual agents to play hide-and-seek. They evolved increasingly clever strategies, eventually hacking the game world’s physics to gain advantage.

How to build robots that respond to novel situations? When prior experience is limited, enabling a model to describe its uncertainty can enable it to explore more avenues to success.

Deep reinforcement learning has given machines apparent hegemony in vintage Atari games, but their scores have been hard to compare — with one another or with human performance — because there are no rules governing what machines can and can’t do to win. Researchers aim to change that.

Researchers typically test deep reinforcement learning algorithms on games from Space Invaders to StarCraft. The Google Brain team in Zurich adds another option: football, also known as soccer.

Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind lost $572 million in the past year, and its losses over the last three years amounted to more than $1 billion. AI contrarian Gary Marcus used the news as an opportunity to question the direction of AI as an industry.