- Demis Hassabis
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Demis Hassabis Born July 1976 (age 35)
North LondonOccupation Videogame designer Neuroscientist Nationality English Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976, United Kingdom) is a computer game designer, AI programmer, neuroscientist and world-class games player. A child prodigy in chess, he reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300. After finishing his A-Level exams two years early he began his computer games career at Bullfrog Productions, first level designing on Syndicate and then at 17 co-designing and lead programming on the classic game Theme Park, with the games designer Peter Molyneux, which went on to sell several million copies and win a Golden Joystick Award. Hassabis then left Bullfrog to take up his place at Queens' College, University of Cambridge where he graduated from the Computer Science Tripos in 1997 with a Double First.
Following his graduation Hassabis worked briefly as a Lead AI programmer on the ground-breaking Lionhead Studios title Black & White before founding Elixir Studios in 1998, a London-based independent games developer. He grew the company to 60 people, signing publishing deals with Vivendi Universal and Microsoft, and was the executive designer of the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius games.
The release of Elixir's pioneering first game, Republic: The Revolution,[1] was delayed several times due to its ambitious scope. The final game was reduced from its original vision and greeted with lukewarm reviews, receiving a Metacritic score of 62/100. Evil Genius fared much better with a score of 77/100, but in April 2005 the intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers and the studio was closed.
Hassabis then left the games industry, switching to cognitive neuroscience, citing a desire to get back to his lifelong passion of developing artificial intelligence technology.[2] Working in the field of autobiographical memory and amnesia he has authored several highly-cited and influential papers, including his most prominent work to date, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2007.[3] It demonstrated that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. Importantly this established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall. Based on these findings and a follow-up fMRI study,[4] Hassabis developed his ideas into a new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination.[5] This work was covered in the mainstream media[6] and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year (at number 9) by the journal Science.[7]
Recently some of Hassabis' findings and interpretations have been challenged by other researchers: A paper by Larry R. Squire and colleagues [8] reported a dissociation between hippocampal lesions and imagination deficits as well as between amnesia and imagination deficits. Furthermore, Squire and colleagues questioned whether the lesions of the patients tested by Hassabis and colleagues were restricted to the hippocampus. The debate is ongoing.[9][10]
Hassabis received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL in 2009 and is continuing his computational neuroscience research as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Gatsby Unit, UCL and in collaboration with groups at MIT and Harvard.
Hassabis won the world games championship at the Mind Sports Olympiad a record five times, prior to his retirement from competitive play in 2002, and is an expert player of many board games including chess, diplomacy, shogi and poker.[11][12] He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in 2009.
References
- ^ Game plays politics with your PC, BBC, Alfred Hermida, 3 September 2003 [1] retrieved 29 April 2011
- ^ Interview in games magazine PC Zone http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=142966
- ^ Patients with hippocampal amnesia cannot imagine new experiences - Hassabis et al. 104 (5): 1726 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- ^ Using Imagination to Understand the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory - Hassabis et al. 27 (52): 14365 - Journal of Neuroscience
- ^ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VH9-4NWNF64-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=fc01ab1f67c10b9fd52aea75eec42e36
- ^ NY Times Article
- ^ Top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2007, Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5858/1844a
- ^ Role of the hippocampus in remembering the past and imagining the future - Squire et al. 107 (44): 19044-19048 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ http://www.boardability.com/profile.php?id=demis_hassabis
- ^ Child prodigy stands by originality, The Guardian, 9th September 2004, by Steve Boxer, [4]
External links
- Demis Hassabis at MobyGames
- Demis Hassabis at the Internet Movie Database
- FIDE rating card for Demis Hassabis
Categories: 1976 births | Living people | British chess players | British computer programmers | British video game designers | Video game programmers | Games all-rounders | Alumni of Queens' College, Cambridge
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