OpenAI thrashes DeepMind using an AI from the 1980's

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have a long history of going back in time to explore old ideas, and now researchers at OpenAI, which is backed by Elon Musk, have revisited "Neuroevolution," a field that has been around since the 1980s, and they've achieved state of the art results. The group, which was led by OpenAI's research director Ilya Sutskever, explored the use of a set of algorithms called "Evolution strategies," which are aimed at solving "optimisation" problems. Optimisation problems are just like they sound, think of something that needs optimising, such as your route to work, a flight plan, or even a healthcare treatment and optimise it. On an abstract level, the technique the team used works by letting successful algorithms to pass their characteristics on to future generations – in short, each successive generation gets better and better at whatever tasks they've been assigned. However, coming back into the present day, the researchers took these algorithms and reworked them so they'd work better with today's deep neural networks and run better on large scale distributed computing systems.