DeepMind's David Silver on games, beauty, and AI's potential to avert human-made disasters - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

David Silver thinks games are the key to creativity. After competing in national Scrabble competitions as a kid, he went on to study at Cambridge and co-found a video game company. Later, after earning his PhD in artificial intelligence, he led the DeepMind team that developed AlphaGo--the first program to beat a world champion at the ancient Chinese game of go. But he isn't driven by competitiveness. That's because for Silver, now a principal research scientist at DeepMind and computer science professor at University College London, games are playgrounds in which to understand how minds--human and artificial--learn on their own to achieve goals. Silver's programs use deep neural networks--machine learning algorithms inspired by the brain's structure and function--to achieve results that resemble human intuition and creativity.