Discovering state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms - Nature

Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired The Experiment, which advertised itself as a more rigorous version of the stunt where volunteers role-play as prison guards and prisoners. The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, would probably have criticised the new versions to preserve his own status, but the main point he made was valid. These people all know they’re on TV, he said. They’re playing to the cameras. Whether the participants in a behavioural study forget they’re part of a study is an eternal debate point. One of the strengths of the other notorious American people-are-awful research project, the Milgram experiment, was that it made the artifice part of the process, telling the volunteers that they’d spoil the science if they didn’t keep giving strangers electric shocks: “The experiment requires that you continue.” Without that, the stooges may never act naturally; if they know the experiment is also a TV show, they definitely won’t.

The growing visibility of Rosana Paulino’s work reaches a new chapter with the opening this week of her first solo exhibition in Paris, at Mendes Wood DM’s outpost in the French capital. Titled “Bloom in the Sunlight, Dream in the Moonlight,” the exhibition introduces new plant goddesses into the Afro-botanical pantheon Paulino has been building since 2019 as part of her ongoing series “Senhora das Plantas” (Lady of the Plants), which elevates Black women to the status of goddesses in communion with nature, without implying a romanticized view. The 16 paintings—five on paper and 12 on canvas—take on renewed vitality on a larger scale and via a deeper exploration of color and increasingly ingenious bodily poses.

Plus, a Patti Smith photo show, an massive Anselm Kiefer finds a home, and other art world matters. The post Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning Meet Again appeared first on Artnet News .