AIs fight to the death in 'Doom' contest next month

Google DeepMind took a leap forward last year when its artificial intelligence agent mastered 49 Atari 2600 games. The learning system, or "deep Q-network" (DQN), that DeepMind designed achieved this mastery through general experience, rather than specific programming for each game. This milestone is just one step along a grander path toward the general-purpose "smart machine": an AI that can master any task with minimal input. DeepMind's work in this field is groundbreaking, and it's helping advance the field in ways you might not expect. Wojciech Jaśkowski is an assistant professor at the Institute of Computing Science (ICS) at Poznan University of Technology, Poland.