Demis Hassabis: from video game designer to Nobel prize winner
Most 17-year-olds spend their days playing video games, but Britain’s latest Nobel prize winner spent his teenage years developing them.
Sir Demis Hassabis, who was jointly awarded the chemistry prize on Wednesday, got his big break in the tech world as co-designer of 1994’s hit game Theme Park, where players create and operate amusement parks.
Born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and Singaporean mother, Hassabis went on to gain a double first in computer science at Cambridge University, launch his own video game company, complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and then co-found the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google bought for £400m in 2014.
He is the chief executive of Google’s AI unit, Google DeepMind, and its achievements in using AI to predict and design the structure of proteins has spurred the award of the Nobel to Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper, who are sharing half of the award with the other half going to the US academic David Baker.
Hassabis has always extolled the benefits of gaming and has described it as a gateway to AI after, as a chess prodigy, he became interested in how chess computers learn to play the game.
