This is a robotics paper by Nvidia & UW researchers.
It is not an Alphabet/Deepmind paper, and it also has nothing to do with the "NIST" OCR dataset.
Was there really not a more appropriate name than "AlphaNIST"?
It is a NIST board challenge. https://www.nist.gov/el/intelligent-systems-division-73500/r...
NIST makes sense, but co-opting Alpha is a bit odd.
Alpha historically had meant "Google DeepMind" not RL
The starting states being at different points in the task and having success-guided starting state sampling seem like really neat ideas. I haven't kept up with RL in a while, how novel is this?
I’m highly entertained by the way the robot tightens nuts. There is no way this would work in the real world :)
(This whole thing is awesome. I think they will need to get the number of rollouts needed down before it translates well to real robots — running hundreds of thousands of rollouts on small parts with a real rollout will be a real logistical mess when cleaning up parts on the floor and dealing with everything that the robots physically break while learning.)
Without clicking the link. What is it? How about a short description?
Alphanist - Some app/lib/code that does something
It's the companion blog post to an Nvidia / UW paper of an approach to solving learning based high precision robotics tasks.
HN guidelines are to use the title of the blog post and not editorialize.