Uncertainties: Project Example Answer

An example answer for the ‘Uncertainties’ question on the EmpowerRD platform.

What scientific or technological uncertainties did the company face?

 Project context:

We’ve created a project example below to help you answer the project questions in alignment with HMRC’s guidance.

The following example answer is for a project that tried to create an imperfect algorithm AI solution for a poker-playing software.

The uncertainties we encountered:

– The current state-of-the-art imperfect information AI algorithms need supercomputer-level resources to train. This is untenable for real-world AI applications, which are more complex than two-player poker, the classic benchmark for researching imperfect information AI algorithms.

– Global AI research efforts have not yet solved the problem of resource efficiency in imperfect information AI algorithms, according to all the published resource papers we could find in the public domain.

– We initially explored existing implementations and found their performance to be lacking: existing AI software libraries are typically written in Python, which has poor performance and is therefore not suitable for the level of efficiency we require from our algorithms. Therefore, we had to create all of our software (both the algorithms and supporting code) from scratch in C++. R&D was necessary so our algorithms could run on a single non-supercomputer.