DeepMind's Agent57 beats humans at 57 classic Atari games

In a preprint paper published this week by DeepMind, Google parent company Alphabet's U.K.-based research division, a team of scientists describe Agent57, which they say is the first system that outperforms humans on all 57 Atari games in the Arcade Learning Environment data set. Assuming the claim holds water, Agent57 could lay the groundwork for more capable AI decision-making models than have been previously released. This could be a boon for enterprises looking to boost productivity through workplace automation; imagine AI that automatically completes not only mundane, repetitive tasks like data entry, but which reasons about its environment. "With Agent57, we have succeeded in building a more generally intelligent agent that has above-human performance on all tasks in the Atari57 benchmark," wrote the study's coauthors. "Agent57 was able to scale with increasing amounts of computation: the longer it trained, the higher its score got."