The Atari 2600 games console has a special place in the hearts of any gamers who grew up in the 1970s. It popularised a number of games that changed the games industry for ever, such as Pong, Breakout and Space Invaders. Today, these games have legendary status and still play an important role in the gaming world.

One curious thing about these games is that computers themselves have never been very good at playing them in the same way as humans. That means playing them by looking at the monitor and judging actions accordingly. This kind of “hand-to-eye” co-ordination has always been a special human skill.

Not any more. Today, Volodymyr Mnih and pals at DeepMind Technologies in London say they’ve created a neural network that learns how to play video games in the same way as humans: using the computer equivalent of hand-to-eye co-ordination.

[...]