DeepMind, the UK-based subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has taught artificial intelligence how to control a nuclear fusion reactor. The company announced on Feb. 16 that it had used AI to successfully control superheated matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor, and their findings are detailed in a paper published in the journal, Nature. DeepMind whose long-term goal is to “solve intelligence, developing more general and capable problem-solving systems, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)” was launched in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014. The scientific discovery company collaborated with the nuclear fusion research lab, the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on the project. Together, they have “developed a new magnetic control method for plasmas based on deep reinforcement learning” which they applied to a real-world plasma for the first time in the SPC’s tokamak research facility, called TCV. TCV is one of the few research centers in the world that has …