Zerg Build Order optimizer. Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures. Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list.
Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community. Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. A new blueprint for artificial general intelligence. (stock image) Demis Hassabis, a research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, is out to create a radical new kind of artficial brain.
A former well-known UK videogame designer and programmer, he has produced a number of amazing games, including the legendary Evil Genius — which he denies selling to Microsoft, thus ruining a perfectly good joke. He also won the World Games Championships a record five times. But in 2005, he decided to move from narrow AI (used in his games) to a bigger challenge: creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). He decided to get a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, because “I felt it would be crazy to ignore the brain as a blueprint for new technologies for creating AGI,” he told me in a Skype chat from London.
Game Theory.