Playing Games with AI

[cached]Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning is certainly the most catchy paper I've read in years. But before I start talking about the paper, you should definitely watch this video from it's presentation:

The basic idea is very simple - to train and evaluate the AI, let it play a variety of computer games. This has several advantages:

• Training and Evaluation can happen faster than real time
• Using several very different games can prevent over-fitting
• Games are usually created to be challenging for humans, thus containing an implicit requirement for intelligence.

DeepMind achieves this by letting it's Deep Reinforcement Learning …

Task Engine

Some years ago, I was fascinated by the inner workings of the games I played. I already had learned C++, so I set out to find out more about the libraries and techniques specific to graphics programming.

My journey began with [cached]NeHe, an excellent series of tutorials for OpenGL beginners. (The lessons are available in many languages, not just C++)

Next, I read up on engine design. Of course, ambitious as I was, I aimed for a fully scalable multi-threaded engine. Had I wanted to create an actual game, this would have led to endless frustration (as any game …