The brilliant minds at Google's sister-company Deepmind are at it again. This time it appears they've developed a system by which driverless cars can navigate the same way humans do: by following directions. A long time ago, before the millenials were born, people had to drive in their cars without any form of GPS navigation. If you wanted to go some place new you used a paper map – they were like offline screenshots of a Google Maps image. Or someone gave you a list of directions.

DeepMind wants to solve the problem of patient deterioration in hospitals. The Google sister-company fed its AI the historical medical records of about 700,000 US veterans in hopes it will learn to predict changes in patient condition that, unchecked, lead to death. The partnership between DeepMind and the Veterans Administration (VA) brings some of the top minds in artificial intelligence research together with "world-renowned clinicians and researchers" working for the government. Basically, the US government is turning to, arguably, the smartest computer on the planet in order to find a cure for human-error. According to the laws of 1980s movies the robots will be attacking by the time you finish reading this sentence.

The team used simulations in a complex world filled with obstacles, but the goal for the AI was simple: Make it as far as possible as fast as possible. The parkour course contained walls, cliffs, hurdles, and tilting floors. The "reward" for the AI drove the simulations to discover new ways to traverse the terrain, and none of the movements were provided programmatically -- this is all emergent behavior. For example, the AI tried many times to learn how to jump over a wall in search of a greater simulated reward. When it finally figured that out, the same movement was adapted by the AI to jump over all the walls.