Google has created an AI system that spends all its time playing and mastering video games. Google introduced the system on Wednesday and has described it as ‘the first significant rung of the ladder’ for more complex computing system to be built upon.

However it wasn’t the company’s intention to create a mere gamer that only provides us with solution with levels that we might be stuck on. The ultimate goal however was principally for the AI to find best solution for any given task that can be applied to real life scenarios.

The research project is by a London startup called DeepMind Technologies that Google acquired last year. They’ve exposed AI software to retro Atari games. The machines were shown 49 games on the Atari 2600 without any direction on how to play.

It is the Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and vice president of engineering at Google, wish that one day, Google’s self-driving cars could learn how to drive based on experience, rather than needing to be taught. ‘This is the first time anyone has built a single learning system that can learn directly from experience and manage a wide range of challenging tasks,” he says.

Though it’s the first step of something bigger Hassabis has admitted that the world is still long way from an AI tech that can think independently. “It’s mastering and understanding the structure of these games, but we wouldn’t say yet it’s building conceptual knowledge or abstract knowledge,” he says. “The ultimate goal here is to build smart, general-purpose machines, but we’re many decades off from doing that.”

The next frontier for the AI is to navigate complicated three-dimensional worlds in games at least that came after the 1990s. By exposing the system to more complicated games, the team hopes to eventually achieve their goal. “If this can drive the car in a racing game, then potentially, with a few real tweaks, it should be able to drive a real car,” Hassabis says. “That’s the ultimate aim.”

Filed in Gaming. Read more about . Source: bloomberg

Discover more from Ubergizmo

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading