DeepMind's "virtual playground" taught AIs how to play games they'd never seen before

DeepMind has created a virtual playground that shows a path to creating general AI -- the holy grail of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning: If you want to train an AI to play chess, you can set up a virtual chessboard, list the rules, and let the AI learn the game through trial and error. When it does something "right," such as capturing a pawn, you give it a reward. When it does something majorly right, like winning the game, you give it a bigger reward. Eventually, the AI will learn what it needs to do to get the most rewards, and boom, you have an AI that can beat any human at chess.