These MIT Tech Review articles, alas, emphasize hype: "No one had ever demonstrated software that could learn to master such a complex task from scratch," and "But until DeepMind’s Atari demo, no one had built a system capable of learning anything nearly as complex as how to play a computer game, says Hassabis."<p>I think the article must have overlooked significant activity in training learning systems to play games well. The glaring omission for me was Neurogammon (1987), later TD-Gammon (1992), developed by Gerry Tesauro and colleagues (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TD-Gammon</a>).<p>Neurogammon was, at the time, a sensation at the same conference the article coyly refers to as "a leading research conference on machine learning." The paper has almost 1000 citations. A curious omission.