Google's DeepMind Masters Atari Games

A computer that taught itself to play almost 50 video games including Space Invaders and Pong is being hailed as the pinnacle of artificial intelligence. But it is unlikely to spark the Terminator-like Armageddon predicted in recent months by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk (who provided early funding for the project) and physicist Stephen Hawking. Despite mastering more than half the classic Atari 2600 games, the program – deep Q-network (DQN), developed by DeepMind Technologies – struggled with more difficult challenges, such as, well, Pac-Man. "On the face of it, it looks trivial in the sense that these are games from the '80s and you can write solutions to them quite easily," said Dr Demis Hassabis, the vice-president of engineering at DeepMind, a British company acquired by a year ago for a reported £400m (US$650m). Never before has a computer taught itself how to do a range of complex operations, said Dr Hassabis, one of the company's co-founders.