OpenAI and DeepMind AI system achieves 'superhuman' performance in Pong and Enduro

Machines learning to play games by watching humans might sound like the plot of a science fiction novel, but that's exactly what researchers at OpenAI -- a nonprofit, San Francisco-based AI research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel, among other tech luminaries -- and Google subsidiary DeepMind claim to have accomplished. In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org Their deep neural network -- which, like other neural networks, consists of mathematical functions loosely modeled on neurons in the brain -- achieved superhuman performance on two out of the nine Atari games tested (Pong and Enduro) and beat baseline models in seven. The research was submitted to the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2018), which is scheduled to take place in Montreal, Canada during the first week in December. "To solve complex real-world problems with reinforcement learning, we cannot rely on manually specified reward functions," the team wrote.