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The school's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab made one of its "neural networks" watch 600 hours of shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "The Office." The deep-learning program predicted the correct action more than 43% of the time when the video was paused one second before the real action. "We wanted to show that just by watching large amounts of video, computers can gain enough knowledge to consistently make predictions about their surroundings," said Carl Vondrick, a PhD student in computer science and artificial intelligence. Even though MIT's algorithms aren't accurate enough yet for real-world application, the study is another example of how technologists are trying to improve artificial intelligence.