Google DeepMind's AI Beats Humans At Even More Computer Games

An anonymous reader writes: Google DeepMind's learning algorithm has trumped human performance in an even greater range of games from the Atari 2600. The system's performance in classic games for the 80's games console has improved steadily since it was revealed in April last year (video) and a paper released yesterday shows it besting people in 31 titles.

Comments

It's all in the reflexes

[BlackHawk-666]

Computer with sub-millisecond reaction time and ability to perfectly calculate matrices, vectors and quaternions as well as predict positioning in x amount of seconds beats person. No-one should be surprised.

Re:It's all in the reflexes

[ShanghaiBill]

Computer with sub-millisecond reaction time and ability to perfectly calculate matrices ...

This is NOT about computers being able to play well. It is about computers LEARNING to play. The point of TFA, is that DeepMind was simply given the goal of "winning", and then learned on its own how to play the game and maximize the score.

Let's play global thermonuclear war with it.

[Joe_Dragon]

What side do you want?

1. USA
2. USSR
3. China
4. United Kingdom
5. France
6. India
7. Pakistan
8. North Korea
9. Israel
10. NATO
11. Iran

Re:Color me shocked

[penguinoid]

Computers have been steadily beating humans at more and more games, "real life" ones or not. Yes, this includes Go. Ironically, humans still beat machines at things that any idiot could do, such as walking or talking or seeing. But even those things are they are getting better and better at (and we aren't), enough to beat us at various surveillance things like recognizing people or license plates.

Humans still beat computers at Calvinball, so there's that.

I hate these stories

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I hate these stories. Games were designed (albeit evolutionarily, through generations of culture) to exploit specific human cognitive limitations in exhaustive search and look ahead, and thereby force us to fall back on things like heuristics and strategies. This makes games unpredictable and interesting.

But computers don't have those limitations. Of course they can out play us at games. They also add faster than we do.

This is all IBM's DeepBlue was, a massive, massive lookahead machine which used a little human-discovered / human programmed rules of thumb to reduce the search space and then human-discovered, human programmed rules of thumb for judging the relative goodness of each move.

The fact that computers are good at beating humans at something specifically designed to make humans perform badly is not an advancement in A.I.

Well, OK it is, but that's not saying much.

Re:I hate these stories

[Moridineas]

But that's not at all the point of this article. The point of this article is that a computer program learned--in a manner SOMEWHAT analogous to human learning--through practicing how to play certain video games without having any game-specific special programming. AI opponents have existed as long as there have been video games (or close to it) and you're right, if that's what this article was about, it would be be boring. Neural net learning by examining visual output--now that's pretty cool.

Re:Color me shocked

[pr0fessor]

I don't want my computer to play classic atari games better than me I want it to make my work easier so I can have more time to play classic atari games, just saying.

Re:Color me shocked

[Dutch Gun]

Pedantically speaking, computers have been beating humans at videogames since they first appeared in arcades.