Shall we play a game? How video games transformed AI

DEEP LEARNING, a form of artificial intelligence, powers voice assistants, facial recognition and music recommendations and underpins pioneering scientific research on how proteins fold. But all this was made possible by a breakthrough in a completely different field: video games. Powerful graphics chips (GPUs), developed to make video games more realistic, turned out to be ideal for speeding up the mathematical calculations used in deep learning. Host Tom Standage finds out how gaming transformed AI and meets the researchers who persevered when the chips were down. Subscribe to The Economist for full access to print, digital and audio editions: economist.com/podcastoffer