GWEN IFILL: Next: Playing video games might seem like childs play.

But, as Tom Clarke of Independent Television News reports, its also at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

TOM CLARKE: It was the late 1970s, and for the first generation of video gamers, Atari was king. By the standards of the day, the graphics were mind-blowing, the sound out of this world.

And the selection of games just went on and on and on.

Ah.

Compared to the video games of today, Atari looks pretty clunky, but the games are still quite difficult to play, especially if you havent picked one up for 30 years, like me. But its that exact combination of simple graphics, but quite challenging game play, that has attracted the cutting edge of artificial intelligence researchers back to the 1970s.

This version of Space Invaders isnt being played by a person, but a system of computer algorithms that is learning how to play it just by looking at the pixels on the screen. It may not sound like it, but its something of a breakthrough, the work of one of the finest young minds in A.I. research, North Londoner Demis Hassabis.

DEMIS HASSABIS, Vice President, DeepMind Technologies: We dont actually give any clues to the system about what it is supposed to do in the game, what its controlling, how it gets a score, whats valuable in the game, what the right strategies are. It has to learn all those things from first principles.

TOM CLARKE: Hassabis shows me his system playing the classic paddle game Breakout.

DEMIS HASSABIS: So now, about two hours in, now it can play the game pretty much as good as any human, professional human player could, even when its coming at very fast angles. And then we thought, well, thats pretty good, but what would happen if we just left it playing for another couple of hours?

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Teaching computers how to play Atari better than humans