Google's New AI Gets Smarter Thanks to a Working Memory

"The behavior of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing and his'state of mind' at that moment." Back in early 2015, Google's mysterious DeepMind unveiled an algorithm that could teach itself to play Atari games. Based on deep neural nets, the AI impressively mastered nostalgic favorites such as Space Invaders and Pong without needing any explicit programming -- it simply learned through millions of examples. But the algorithm had a weakness: memory. Without a memory module, it couldn't store away any information it had already mastered.