27 GMT Last modified on Tue 28 Nov ‘17 03.
44 GMT This article is 10 months old Researchers have overcome one of the major stumbling blocks in artificial intelligence with a program that can learn one task after another using skills it acquires on the way.
 Developed by Google’s AI company, DeepMind, the program has taken on a range of different tasks and performed almost as well as a human.
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 But we know that one thing that was considered to be a big block is not insurmountable,” Kirkpatrick said.
 “We are still a really long way from general-purpose artificial intelligence and there are many research challenges left to solve,” he added.
 “One key part of the puzzle is building systems that can learn to tackle new tasks and challenges while retaining the abilities that they have already learnt.
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