I will address your points here, but you should really review your own comments for the bad faith discussion you accuse me of doing.
> Sorry, it's probably not your paper. But it's as far from folding laundry as you can go. I don't even see the simulated robot folding simulated laundry anywhere yet and even "simulated cloth" is a joke - the simulation itself (of the behaviour of cloth) is not even close to the real world. Simulating a robot opening a simulated door might get your paper published, but simulating a robot folding simulated shirts won't even get you a simulated paper
You are right that you never said "cop out" but I am just summarizing your words. Your complaint is stating that RL doesn't tackle training in the real world. In some way, RL is "neglecting the responsibility of training a real physical robot". That is the definition of "cop out". To which I have already openly admitted that the responsibility of training a physical robot, while the long term vision, is not the intermediate goal at the moment.
No, there is no comparison between a simulating chessboard and the real world physics. All I am stating is that one just needs the simulation to be realistic enough. The problem is not the fact that it is simulated. If your complaint is that the physics engines are not good enough to train RL agents, that is completely orthogonal to the field of RL. Work is being done by these folks as well. Again, it also ignores every self-driving company who do use simulated virtual environment to train/test their algorithms.
Again, I am not overplaying or underplaying anything. I have yet to make any claim other than "RL people know we are very far from anything robotics related". I don't know how that can possibly be construed as overplaying.
If you feel that the LASER paper accomplished nothing, then we just fundamentally disagree. They did something that no one had ever done before in the field of RL. Is that not the definition of original research?
But you're misrepresenting my comments again! I never said that training in
simulation is a "cop out" because I don't think it's a cop out!
I agree that simulation results can be real resuls. I concede that the LASER
paper made an original contribution to knowledge. My complain is that you
overplay the result in the LASER paper when you say that "with a couple of expert
examples and algorithm can learn to open a door effectively" but ommit to
mention that this happened in simulation.
There's more to say here that I'd like to put into words at some point, but I
don't think I'm in the right mood right now. I apologise if you were hoping for
some more insightful remarks from me. Thanks for the conversation - I appreciate
the time you took to give your point of view and share your expertise.
> Sorry, it's probably not your paper. But it's as far from folding laundry as you can go. I don't even see the simulated robot folding simulated laundry anywhere yet and even "simulated cloth" is a joke - the simulation itself (of the behaviour of cloth) is not even close to the real world. Simulating a robot opening a simulated door might get your paper published, but simulating a robot folding simulated shirts won't even get you a simulated paper
You are right that you never said "cop out" but I am just summarizing your words. Your complaint is stating that RL doesn't tackle training in the real world. In some way, RL is "neglecting the responsibility of training a real physical robot". That is the definition of "cop out". To which I have already openly admitted that the responsibility of training a physical robot, while the long term vision, is not the intermediate goal at the moment.
No, there is no comparison between a simulating chessboard and the real world physics. All I am stating is that one just needs the simulation to be realistic enough. The problem is not the fact that it is simulated. If your complaint is that the physics engines are not good enough to train RL agents, that is completely orthogonal to the field of RL. Work is being done by these folks as well. Again, it also ignores every self-driving company who do use simulated virtual environment to train/test their algorithms.
Again, I am not overplaying or underplaying anything. I have yet to make any claim other than "RL people know we are very far from anything robotics related". I don't know how that can possibly be construed as overplaying.
If you feel that the LASER paper accomplished nothing, then we just fundamentally disagree. They did something that no one had ever done before in the field of RL. Is that not the definition of original research?