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

FILE - In this Oct. 5, 2004 file photo, a youth tries a Ms. Pac-Man TV game in New York. 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 they don’t seem to have a ghost of a chance at Ms. Pac-Man. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 5, 2004 file photo, a youth tries a Ms. Pac-Man TV game in New York. 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 they don’t seem to have a ghost of a chance at Ms. Pac-Man. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File) FILE - In this Oct. 5, 2004 file photo, a youth tries a Ms. Pac-Man TV game in New York. 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 they don’t seem to have a ghost of a chance at Ms. Pac-Man. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

By Associated Press 4 min read

WASHINGTON (AP) – 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. 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.”