New breakthrough gives AI a human memory

When researchers decide to train their latest and greatest artificial intelligence (AI) systems there's one big, fundamental flaw they have to deal with – AI's, by nature – and design – are amnesiacs, that is to say they have great difficulty in retaining knowledge between tasks. It's the equivalent of trying to train someone something new when they're always forgetting stuff. So as you can imagine if you're trying to teach an AI something new it can get quite frustrating, there's even a special term for it – "Catastrophic forgetting." In a new demonstration of just how close the associations between AI's and our own brains have become though Google's DeepMind engineers, the same crazy cats who recently published a breakthrough Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) architecture, who've been teaching their AI's to dream and fight with each other, and annihilate online gamers, have just created an AI that can retain its knowledge between tasks – turning raw memory into long term experiences that stay with the program, even as it moves onto other things. And they published a paper on it.