Togelius: Why video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence

The most important thing for humanity to do right now is to invent true artificial intelligence (AI): machines or software that can think and act independently in a wide variety of situations. Once we have artificial intelligence, it can help us solve all manner of other problems. While most of them work on ways of using known AI algorithms to solve new problems, some work on the overarching problem of artificial general intelligence. As I see it, addressing applied problems spur the invention of new algorithms, and the availability of new algorithms make it possible to address new problems. Having concrete problems to try to solve with AI is necessary in order to make progress; if you try to invent AI without having something to use it for, you will not know where to start. My chosen domain is games, and I will explain why this is the most relevant domain to work on if you are serious about AI. I talk about this a lot. All the time, some would say. But first, let us acknowledge that AI has gotten a lot of attention recently, in particular work on "deep learning" is being discussed in mainstream press as well as turned into startups that get bought by giant companies for bizarre amounts of money. There have been some very impressive advances during the past few years in identifying objects in images, understanding speech, matching names to faces, translating text and other such tasks.