Designing Autonomous AI

Chapter 7. Teaching Skills to Your AI Brain

By the time that you finish setting goals for your AI brain, you should have a good idea about which skills you need your AI to practice to succeed at the task you are designing it to perform. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to translate this list of key skills into a brain design that serves as a mental map to guide and focus the AI as it practices and explores. In “How Humans Make Decisions and Acquire Skills”, I presented a framework for skill acquisition for specific tasks to AI. The performance of your AI will depend most, though, on your level of teaching sophistication. Figure 7-1 shows the levels of teaching sophistication you can achieve. The further you progress up this ladder as a teacher, the more expert your AI can become.

Figure 7-1. Levels of teaching sophistication. The farther you progress up this ladder as a teacher, the more expert your AI can become.

Teaching Focuses and Guides Practice (Exploration)

Batting in baseball demonstrates this well. Unlike in basketball, football, and soccer, where many skill motions are used to launch the ball and score (e.g., jump shot, hook shot, or layup in basketball; pass or punt in football; throw in, instep kick, back-heel kick, header, and bicycle kick for soccer), baseball has only one method to propel the ball from home plate: batting.

Figure 7-2. Stages of batting ...