Rats playing video games could make computers smarter

Larger data sets and faster computers have enabled a recent flurry of progress--and investment--in artificial intelligence. David Cox of Harvard thinks the next big jump will depend on understanding what happens inside the head of a rat when it plays video games. Cox leads a 28 million project called Ariadne, funded by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that is looking for clues in mammalian brains to make software smarter. "This is a huge, moonshot-like effort to go into the brain and see what clues and tricks are hiding there for us to find," he said today at EmTech MIT 2016. Recent progress in tasks such as image recognition and translation sprang from putting more computing power behind a technique known as deep learning, which is loosely inspired by neuroscience.