Demis Hassabis: 15 facts about the DeepMind Technologies founder

The man behind Google's new £400m acquisition is a former child prodigy who was a chess master and a games developer before moving into artificial intelligence• Now 37, Hassabis was born in London in July 1976 and quickly showed academic promise and skill with board games, especially chess.• At the ages of 13 Hassabis reached the rank of chess master, and was the second-highest-rated player in the world under 14 at the time – beaten only by the Hungarian chess grandmaster and strongest female chess player in history, Judit Polgár.• Accelerated through school, Hassabis completed his A-level exams two years early.• He began a career in video games at British studio Bullfrog Productions, co-designing and lead programming on the classic game Theme Park at 17 years old, alongside the legendary games designer Peter Molyneux.• Released in 1994, Theme Park sold several million copies and won a Golden Joystick award. The game set players the task of building a successful theme park in the UK with just a few thousand pounds and a small plot of land. (Strategies for success in the game included putting more salt in crisps so people would buy more drinks, making queues long but fast-moving and obscuring the destination, hiring a cleaner to clean the toilets, and placing the exit of one roller-coaster close to the entrance of the next to minimise walking distance between attractions.)• Hassabis left Bullfrog to study Computer Science Tripos at Cambridge University, which i...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: theguardian.com Blogposts Consciousness Computing Technology UK news London Google Business Artificial intelligence (AI) Science Source Type: news