We see potential uses in companionship and affective interaction. The robot’s ability to elicit spontaneous touching and positive emotional responses suggests it could serve in therapeutic settings or as a social presence for people who spend time alone. The quiet operation and gentle movement make it suitable for environments where noise and sudden motions would be disruptive.
A little sad for me because I've enjoyed the global leaderboard aspect for years but of course my second reaction has to be to take a step back and appreciate all the joy that this one man has given us for all these years.
And he's made it clear from that start that he never intended the global leaderboard to be the point, plus AI the last few years messes it all up. All good things come to an end, and I gotta appreciate the good run that we had, and the voluntary work of one person that gifted it to us.
Not sure if you meant this because it doesn't cite the paper you mention, but it's a similar work: "An Investigation of Model-Free Planning", Guez et Al. (Deepmind) 2019 https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.03559
For problems that human teams eventually get correct, they seem to have submitted mostly 1 time -- occasionally 2 or 3. For problems that they did not get correct, there are some problems with up to 16 submissions.
