HAL wins: Computer program bests humans at ‘Space Invaders’

WASHINGTON — Computers already have bested human champions in “Jeopardy!” and chess, but artificial intelligence now has gone to master 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. “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. This program, he said, “is the first rung of the ladder.” Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Emma Brunskill, who also wasn’t part of the study, said this learning despite lack of customization “brings us closer to having general purpose agents equipped to work well at learning a large range of tasks, instead of just chess or just ‘Jeopardy!’” To go from pixels on a screen to making decisions on what to do next, without even a hint of pre-programmed guidance, “is really exciting,” Brunskill said. Deep Q isn’t showing what Hassabis would call creativity, he said: “I would call it figuring out something that already existed in the world.” Creativity would be if the program created its own computer game, Hassabis said.