Google in its plans to take over the world has developed artificial intelligence (AI) that can learn old Atari games just by watching them and fight back human opponents.
DeepMind Technologies, a British AI company that was acquired by Google in 2014, has created an AI gamer called Deep Q-Network that can play 49 video games from an Atari 2600. The AI gamer can not only play the classic Atari games but it can also beat top scores of skilled human players in more than 20 games. The AI gamer does not go through the game manual but instead watches humans play the game and learn from them.
“It really is the first algorithm that can match human performance across a wide range of challenging tasks,” says DeepMind, co-founder Demis Hassabis.
Demis also proposed that the AI gamer is very similar to humans when it comes to learning as it gets better each time it plays, till it becomes nearly perfect in playing a particular game.
Google AI gamers’ best performance was on simple boxing and pinball games. However, the software also achieved high scores on Breakout, a classic Atari game that needs bouncing of a ball so that rows of bricks can be cleared. Demis suggests that the AI gamer also learned some tricks that professional Breakout human gamers use.
Even though the AI gamer did really well on some of the games, it also underperformed in some other classics such as Pac-Man.
The purpose of developing the AI gamer is not known. However, market observers suggest that the software can help the company improve upon its ads service.
AI is getting a lot of traction in the technology industry and Google is not the only company that is developing AI software. Baidu, which is the Chinese equivalent of Google has set up the Institute of Deep Learning and also hired experts to understand the potential of AI.
Social media website Facebook has also set up an Artificial Intelligence Research Lab and Yann LeCun, a deep learning expert will lead the division to unravel the prospect of AI.
Twitter bought Madbits in 2014, a deep learning startup. Madbits utilises deep learning methods for understanding an image’s content.
AI in the gaming have been around but learning and remembering big data sets will make playing with an AI will not only help the gamer but also excel in the game and try to defeat it. Google suggests that the next step will be to check the AI gamer’s ability on 3D video games that were developed in the 1990s.
