David Silver (born 1976) is a British computer scientist and businessman who leads the

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on

AlphaGo AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by DeepMind Technologies a subsidiary of Google (now Alphabet Inc.). Subsequent versions of AlphaGo became increasingly powerful, including a version that competed u ...

AlphaZero AlphaZero is a computer program developed by artificial intelligence research company DeepMind to master the games of chess, shogi and go. This algorithm uses an approach similar to AlphaGo Zero. On December 5, 2017, the DeepMind team re ...

and co-lead on AlphaStar.

Education

He graduated from the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award, and befriended

Demis Hassabis Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. In his early career he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert player of board games. He is the chief executive officer and ...

whilst there. Silver returned to academia in 2004 at the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a Public university, public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexande ...

to study for a PhD on reinforcement learning, where he co-introduced the algorithms used in the first master-level 9×9 Go programs and graduated in 2009. His version of program ''MoGo'' (co-authored with Sylvain Gelly) was one of the strongest Go programs as of 2009.

Career

After graduating from university, Silver co-founded the video games company

Elixir Studios Elixir Studios was a British video game developer. The company was founded in 1998 by Demis Hassabis, formerly a prominent figure at Lionhead Studios. At its height, it employed around sixty people, and was based in London London is th ...

, where he was CTO and lead programmer, receiving several awards for technology and innovation. Silver was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011, and subsequently became a lecturer at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

, where he is now a professor. His lectures on Reinforcement Learning are available on YouTube. Silver consulted for DeepMind from its inception, joining full-time in 2013. His recent work has focused on combining

with deep learning, including a program that learns to play Atari games directly from pixels. Silver led the AlphaGo project, culminating in the first program to defeat a top professional player in the full-size game of Go.

subsequently received an honorary 9 Dan Professional Certification; and won the Cannes Lion award for innovation. He then led development of

, which used the same AI to learn to play Go from scratch (learning only by playing itself and not from human games) before learning to play chess and shogi in the same way, to higher levels than any other computer program. Silver is among the most published members of staff at DeepMind, with over 130,000 citations and has an ''h''-index of 78. He was awarded the 2019 ACM Prize in Computing for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing. In 2021, Silver was elected Fellow of the Royal Society for his contributions to Deep Q-Networks and

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Silver, David Alumni of the University of Cambridge Computer programmers Go (game) researchers Living people AlphaGo University of Alberta alumni Academics of University College London 1970s births Year of birth missing (living people)