Google DeepMind

Google's Deep-Q computer program has mastered several classic video games, from Space Invaders to Breakout.

After conquering Jeopardy and chess, artificial intelligence masters an entirely new level: Space Invaders.

Google scientists have cooked up software that can do better than humans on dozens of Atari video games from the 1980s, like video pinball, boxing, and Breakout. But computers don't seem to have a ghost of a chance at Ms Pac-Man.

The aim is not to make video games a spectator sport, turning couch potatoes who play games into couch potatoes who watch computers play games. The real accomplishment: computers that can teach themselves to succeed at tasks, learning from scratch, trial and error, just like humans.

The computer program, called Deep Q-network, wasn't given much in the way of instructions to start, but in time it did better than humans in 29 out of 49 games and in some cases, like video pinball, it did 26 times better, according to a new study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. It's a first time an artificial intelligence program bridged different type of learning systems, said study author Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind in London.

Deep Q "can learn and adapt to unexpected things," Hassabis said in a news conference. "These types of systems are more human-like in the way they learn."

In the submarine game Seaquest, Deep Q came up with a strategy that the scientists had never considered.

"It's definitely fun to see computers discover things that you didn't figure out yourself," said study co-author Volodymyr Mnih, also of Google.

Sebastian Thrun, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, who wasn't part of the research, said in an email: "This is very impressive. Most people don't understand how far (artificial intelligence) has come. And this is just the beginning."

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Artificial intelligence beats humans at Space Invaders