Never play games with a bot(robot)—it will find a way to cheat if it can. A team from OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco, has developed artificially intelligent bots that taught themselves to cooperate by playing hide-and-seek. The bots also learned how to use basic tools to help them win.

Bowen Baker at Open AI and his colleagues wanted to see if the team-based dynamics of the OpenAI Five could be used to produce skills that could one day be useful to humans.

The researchers set their bots loose in a simulated (模拟的) environment filled with fixed walls, movable boxes and ladders, and left them to play team games of hide-and-seek. The bots each had their own view of the world and couldn’t communicate with each other directly.

At first, the hiders simply ran away. But they soon worked out that the quickest way to stop the seekers was to find objects in the environment to hide themselves from view. The seekers learned that they could move boxes around and use them to climb over walls. The bots then discovered that being a team-player -passing objects to each other or cooperating on a hideout -was the quickest way to win.

But the real surprise came when the bots started making use of problems or faults. Seekers found that if they pushed a ladder towards a wall, they could launch themselves into the air and spot hiders from above. Hiders found that they could get rid of the ladders by pushing them aside.

It shows that AIs are able to find solutions that humans miss, says Baker. “Maybe they’ll even be able to solve problems that humans don’t yet know how to.” However, it is a large leap (跳跃) from virtual hide and seek to real problem-solving. “The main limitation is that it is in simulation,” says Chelsea Finn at Stanford University.

Imagine waking up to find a cup of coffee ready and floors swept. With smart devices(装置)controlled by Al, all housework can be done while you are asleep.

Now your kids can try these devices at the small home show in our community science center from August 1st to August 14th. Here in the center we have many fun activities. Children can also try out cleaning robot Little Q. It is a cute robot with a round head, two big eyes and two long legs. It’s like a big toy. Your children will love it.

Opening Hours: 1:00 p. m. -9:00 p. m. from Tuesday to Sunday, closed on Monday.

Visitors: People of all ages are welcome. Children under 12 should come along with their parents. No pets are allowed.

Food & Drinks: No outside food or drinks. Visitors can buy food and drinks in the center,

Tickets: Please call 769520 to book a ticket. Kindly note that You CAN’T book a ticket on our website or through e-mail. And it is NOT possible to buy a ticket at our ticket office as it is closed.

Brown cows may not actually make chocolate milk, but pink silkworms（蚕）do produce pink silk, a team of scientists has discovered. To see if they could produce pre-dyed silk-silk that comes colored, straight from the source-the team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry（桑树）leaves that had been sprayed（喷洒）with fabric（织物）dyes（染色剂）. Out of seven tested dyes, only one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of pink-dyed hair.

And yes, the worms themselves take on some color before they produce silk. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth, the team, which included engineers and biologists from the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory in India, reports in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. (The researchers didn't look too deeply into how the dyes affected the silkworms' health. After all, silkworms die when people harvest their silk.)

The team made dyeing silk this way because coloring fabric normally uses large amounts of fresh water. The water gets polluted with dangerous chemicals in the process, requiring costly treatment before factories can send it back into waterways. Dyeing silk directly by feeding silkworms would avoid those water-washing steps. Scientists are just starting to study this idea. However, it remains to be seen if it's commercially successful. In this experiment, the Indian team tested seven dyes, which are cheap and popular in the industry.

The scientists found different dyes moved through silkworms' bodies differently. Some never made it into the worms' silk at all. Others colored the worms and their silk, but the color disappears before the silk is turned into fabric. Only one dye, named "direct acid fast red", showed up in the final, washed silk threads. By the time it made it there, it was a pleasant, light pink.