By Teaching Computers 'Regret,' Engineers Hope to Teach Them to See the Future
Google Wants Computers to Feel Regret Who feels regret now? practicalowl via Flickr Artificial Intelligence researchers have struggled for decades to create computers that can understand the range of human emotions and feelings, but a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University simply wants to make them feel regret. Working with funding from Google, they hope to make computers understand what it's like to pursue an outcome only to be disappointed. That, they think, could really help computers predict the future. While software may never know what it's like to roll out of bed with splitting headache and dress quietly in the dark, it can certainly measure the distance between a desired outcome and the actual outcome achieved. And by doing so computers could learn to minimize "regret," which in this case is measured by that distance. TAU computer scientists working on learning theory and other thorny computer intelligence issues think that...