This AI Thrashes the Hardest Atari Games by Memorizing Its Best Moves

Learning from rewards seems like the simplest thing. I make coffee, I sip coffee, I'm happy. My brain registers "brewing coffee" as an action that leads to a reward. That's the guiding insight behind deep reinforcement learning, a family of algorithms that famously smashed most of Atari's gaming catalog and triumphed over humans in strategy games like Go. Here, an AI "agent" explores the game, trying out different actions and registering ones that let it win.