DeepMind wants to make its AI even better at playing games

DeepMind, a research lab that was acquired by Google for £400 million, has become a well known entity in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for building agents that can learn and master games such as arcade classic "Space Invaders" and the ancient Chinese board game of "Go". Over the last year, the five-year-old company, which employs approximately 250 people in London, has been branching out and applying its self-learning algorithms to fields such as healthcare and energy. On the latter, it's helped Google to slash the electricity bill in its data centres worldwide and it's now exploring how it can help the National Grid to predict demand. But Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's cofounder and CEO, announced on Sunday that the company isn't about to turn its back on the gaming field any time soon. In fact, Hassabis wrote on Twitter that DeepMind has been busy improving the AlphaGo [AG] agent that beat Lee SeDol, the world's best Go player, earlier this year.