Why Graphics Cards are Hacking the Future

In 2013, years before DeepMind would unveil an AI that would defeat of one of the world's best Go players, the company published an influential paper showing how "deep reinforcement learning" could be used to teach computers how to play Atari 2600 video games. While GPUs were originally designed as specialized processors optimized to render millions of pixels required for simulating 3D environments, repurposing GPUs to train artificial intelligence algorithms has been commonplace for a while. But it wasn't until I read Andrej Karpathy's recent post on reinforcement learning, however, that something clicked about how interesting this is: Graphics cards, originally designed for human vision of video games, are now being used for computer "vision" of video games. When I was growing up, getting a graphics card was kind of a Big Deal. The first one I got for Christmas in 1997 was a Pure3D Canopus Voodoo card based on the 3dfx chipset. It let me run Quake smoothly on my Pentium Compaq, which was a top priority of my life at the time.