This paper published in Nature on 26th February 2015, describes a DeepRL system which combines Deep Neural Networks with Reinforcement Learning at scale for the first time, and is able to master a diverse range of Atari 2600 games to superhuman level with only the raw pixels and score as inputs.

For artificial agents to be considered truly intelligent they should excel at a wide variety of tasks that are considered challenging for humans. Until this point, it had only been possible to create individual algorithms capable of mastering a single specific domain. With our algorithm, we leveraged recent breakthroughs in training deep neural networks to show that a novel end-to-end reinforcement learning agent, termed a deep Q-network (DQN), was able to surpass the overall performance of a professional human reference player and all previous agents across a diverse range of 49 game scenarios.