[HN Gopher] The Balloon Learning Environment
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The Balloon Learning Environment
Author : agmm
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-04-25 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ai.googleblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ai.googleblog.com)
| whatever1 wrote:
| Yeah I don't buy the baseline comparison of the "expert designed
| controller" that cannot stay within bounds.
|
| We can control systems that have not only fluid-mechanical, but
| also heat transfer and chemical reactions, all happening at the
| same time with huge bars of uncertainty.
|
| Next.
| krisoft wrote:
| The environment has been released. If you or anyone else wishes
| to give it a go you can develop a controller any whichever way
| you fancy.
|
| The baseline comparison is not meant to be some final word on
| any given controller. In this case they clearly cite it to a
| particular paper. [1]
|
| 1: https://github.com/google/balloon-learning-
| environment/blob/...
| whatever1 wrote:
| Then their wording is misleading.
|
| They compared against another bad RL system and they are
| better than that.
|
| That is far from an "expert control system"
| krisoft wrote:
| Ah! I see where the miscommunication happens. They use the
| word in a particular context.
|
| Here "expert control system" means that it has a decision
| logic designed by some humans. They sit down wrote an
| algorithm and said "I think this is a good idea based on
| what I know about the problem." Compare it with a
| reinforcement learning system, where they let loose a
| generic learning algorithm on the problem and then they see
| how it performs.
|
| In this context "expert control system" doesn't mean that
| it was expertly designed, or even that it is any good. It
| just means that humans designed it for this particular
| problem.
| whatever1 wrote:
| This makes sense. Thanks for the clarification :)
| mockery wrote:
| The word expert is not being used in the colloquial sense,
| but in the technical sense of an "Expert System":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
| mathogre wrote:
| For a bit of background, go to: https://x.company/projects/loon/
|
| I was working on the Air Traffic Control side of unmanned free
| balloons in 2020, and Loon was an exciting project. While it's a
| shame it wasn't financially viable, they had it working with up
| to 60-ish balloons in the stratosphere at any given time. This
| was an amazing accomplishment.
|
| The navigation was equally amazing. It was Loon who did some real
| research on stratospheric weather. While many meteorological
| entities throughout the world knew and understood tropospheric
| weather, the stratosphere was mostly unknown. In addition to AI,
| Google really did expand the knowledge and science of
| stratospheric weather.
| bluetwo wrote:
| I thought this project was pretty impressive. I feel like this
| is a thing that is going to come back around once costs come
| down and a killer app is found for it.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Balloon retrieval might be a problem that would have to be
| solved while keeping operation costs low.
|
| I knew some friends over at Loon and one of their challenges
| was it wasn't highly deterministic where the balloon would
| land at the end of life, and they had a rescue team with
| speedboats, helicopters and land rovers to go recover
| balloons. They could pick a big enough radius and have it
| land somewhere within that to avoid cities, and human
| settlements.
|
| Also, Alphabet burned considerable money on this for 9 years
| before shutting down. Not sure if it'll come back, at least
| not by Alphabet.
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