An artificial-intelligence algorithm that discovers its own way to learn achieves state-of-the-art performance, including on some tasks it had never encountered before. Joel Lehman is at Lila Sciences ...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. People’s daily interactions with online algorithms affect how they learn ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.