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Learning Physical Intuition of Block Towers by Example (arxiv.org)
39 points by mrdrozdov on Mar 8, 2016 | hide | past | pdf | 3 comments on HN

In plain words: A vision network watched simulated wooden-block towers either topple or stay standing and learned to guess the outcome and where each block would move. It handled towers with an extra block and photos of real blocks about as accurately as people.

Abstract

Wooden blocks are a common toy for infants, allowing them to develop motor skills and gain intuition about the physical behavior of the world. In this paper, we explore the ability of deep feed-forward models to learn such intuitive physics. Using a 3D game engine, we create small towers of wooden blocks whose stability is randomized and render them collapsing (or remaining upright). This data allows us to train large convolutional network models which can accurately predict the outcome, as well as estimating the block trajectories. The models are also able to generalize in two important ways: (i) to new physical scenarios, e.g. towers with an additional block and (ii) to images of real wooden blocks, where it obtains a performance comparable to human subjects.

Adam Lerer, Sam Gross, Rob Fergus
arXiv:1603.01312 · cs.AI · submitted Mar 3, 2016
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The corresponding UnrealEngine Torch plugin is released here: https://github.com/facebook/UETorch
Papers like these make me appreciate why Torch was chosen for Lua.
Here is a Facebook by Yann LeCun about this, just a little background on the project, on-going projects at FAIR, and some promotion of FAIR (Facebook AI Research):

https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10153408304077143