Google's DeepMind AI: Now it taps into dreams to learn even faster

Google DeepMind's new agent uses the same deep reinforcement learning methods that it's previously employed to master the game Go. The latest AI creation from the researchers at Google's DeepMind lab is UNREAL, a particularly quick agent that could tackle more complex tasks than just games. DeepMind researchers present their findings in a new paper describing UNsupervised REinforcement and Auxiliary Learning or UNREAL, which in part borrows from the way animals dream to speed up learning. Testing the agent on Atari games and the 3D game Labyrinth, they found that it was able to learn 10 times faster than its previous algorithms. It also averages 87 percent expert human performance on Labyrinth.