MIT researchers just got a computer to accomplish yet another task that most humans are incapable of doing: It learned how to play a game by reading the instruction manual.

The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab has a computer that now plays Civilization all by itself — and it wins nearly 80% of the time. Those are better stats than most of us could brag about, but the real win here is the fact that instruction manuals don’t explain how to win a game, just how to play it.

The results may be game-oriented, but the real purpose for the experiment was to get a computer to do more than process words as data — and to actually process them as language. In this case, the computer read instructions on how to play a rather complex game, then proceeded to not only play that game, but to play it very well.

If you take the same process and replace gaming with something more real-world applicable, like medicine or automotive tech, you could have a computer that’s able to act as more than just a reference tool. A lot more.

Take IBM’s Watson. Sure, it’s an amazing advance in computing technology, but it’s based on the idea that if you load monstrously huge amounts of data into a computer, that it could put it to use in a way that a human might. The results are pretty decent, but they’re very specific to what kind of data the machine’s been given — and right now that data is likely to be things like sales catalogues and insurance policies. Loading hordes of medical journals into a Watson-style machine could make for something very useful in diagnostics, but it’s not going to make a doctor.

Teaching a computer to actually read medical books, like a student in med school would, is something entirely different.

That may be a bit far-flung for the moment, though. A more short-term goal would probably be language, which is in line with the original goal for the experiment. Now that a computer’s learned how to read an instruction manual, it’s not too far a leap to think that it could read through foreign language books, and actually learn a language.

What we’d have at that point would be a computer that could translate phrases based on their intended meaning, instead of just processing word definitions and grammar rules. Eliminating the language barrier across the globe would be a hell of a lot better than winning a game of Civilization, after all.

Read more at MIT News