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MostCynical [soylentnews.org] writes:

the Guardian [theguardian.com] reports that a team from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has built a robot that has taught itself to play Jenga.

Jenga-playing machine can learn the complex physics involved in withdrawing wooden blocks from a tower through physical trial and error.

This differentiates it from robots that have mastered purely cognitive games such as chess and Go through visual cues.

“Playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing and aligning pieces,” said Prof Alberto Rodriguez from the department of mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The robot grouped the outcomes of approximately 300 attempts as it discovered that some blocks were harder to budge than others. “The robot builds clusters and then learns models for each of these clusters, instead of learning a model that captures absolutely everything that could happen,” said the paper’s lead author, MIT graduate student Nima Fazeli.

Miquel Oller, a member of the team, said: “We saw how many blocks a human was able to extract before the tower fell and the difference was not that much.”

Judging from the embedded video [youtu.be], it plays better than I do..

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