Search Search New artificial intelligence can learn how to play vintage video games from scratch The Deep Q-network has learned to play Space Invaders and Breakout Click to follow The Independent Online Space Invaders, one of the 49 classic Atari games that the Deep Q-network has mastered A new kind of computer intelligence has learned to play dozens of vintage video games without any prior help in how to achieve human-like scoring abilities, scientists said.
 The intelligent machine learns by itself from scratch using a trial-and-error approach that is reinforced by the reward of a score in the game.
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 The system of software algorithms is called Deep Q-network and has learned to play 49 classic Atari games such as Space Invaders and Breakout, but only with the help of information about the pixels on a screen and the scoring method.
 The researchers behind the development said that it represents a breakthrough in artificial intelligence capable of learning from scratch without being fed instructions from human experts – the classic method for chess-playing machines such as IBM’s Deep Blue computer.
 “This work is the first time anyone has built a single, general learning system that can learn directly from experience to master a wide range of challenging tasks, in this case a set of Atari games, and to perform at or better than human level,” said Demis Hassabis, a former neuroscientist and founder of DeepMind Technologies, which was bought by Google for £400m in 2014.
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 You literally give them a perceptual experience and they learn to do things directly from that perceptual experience from first principles,” Mr Hassabis added.
 An advantage of “reinforced learning” rather than “supervised learning” of previous artificial intelligence computers is that the designers and programmers do not need to know the solutions to the problems because the machines themselves will be able to master the task, he said.
 “These type of systems are more human-like in the way they learn in the sense that it’s how humans learn.
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 What does the creation of Deep Q mean?
 A machine with a human-like brainpower is the stuff of nightmares, and even scientists such as Stephen Hawking have warned about the existential threat posed by uncontrolled artificial intelligence.
 Movies such as 'I, Robot' have speculated on the threat that artificial intelligence may pose The latest Deep Q-network is far from being able to wield this kind of malign power.
 However, what makes it interesting, and some might say potentially dangerous, is that it was inspired and built on the neural networks of the human brain.