David Silver (born 1976) is a principal research scientist at

Google DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Goo ...

and a professor at

University College London University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

. He has led research on

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learnin ...

with

AlphaGo AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go. It was developed by the London-based DeepMind Technologies, an acquired subsidiary of Google. Subsequent versions of AlphaGo became increasingly powerful, including a version that c ...

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

and co-lead on AlphaStar.

Education

He studied at

Christ's College, Cambridge Christ's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college includes the Master, the Fellows of the College, and about 450 undergraduate and 250 graduate students. The c ...

, graduating in 1997 with the Addison-Wesley award, and having befriended

Demis Hassabis Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Ha ...

whilst at Cambridge. 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 research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta, and Henry Marshall Tory, t ...

to study for a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

, 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 and research

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

Elixir Studios Elixir Studios was a British video game developer. History The company was founded on 7 July 1998 by Demis Hassabis, formerly a prominent figure at Lionhead Studios. After failing to secure venture capital at acceptable terms, Hassabis had p ...

, where he was CTO and lead programmer, receiving several awards for technology and innovation. Silver was awarded a

Royal Society University Research Fellowship __NOTOC__ The Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) is a research fellowship awarded to outstanding early career scientists in the United Kingdom who are judged by the Royal Society to have the potential to become leaders in their fie ...

in 2011, and subsequently became a

lecturer Lecturer is an academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. They may also conduct re ...

. His lectures on Reinforcement Learning are available on YouTube. Silver consulted for

from its inception, joining full-time in 2013. His recent work has focused on combining

with

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

, including a program that learns to play

Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French holding company Atari SA (formerly Infogrames) and its focus is on "video games, consumer hardware, licensing and bl ...

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 Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...

and

shogi , also known as Japanese chess, is a Strategy game, strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as chess, Western chess, chaturanga, xiangqi, Indian chess, and janggi. ...

in the same way, to higher levels than any other computer program. Silver is among the most published members of staff at Google DeepMind, with over 200,000 citations and has an ''h''-index of 97 according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

Awards and honours

Silver was awarded the 2019

ACM Prize in Computing The ACM Prize in Computing was established by the Association for Computing Machinery to recognize individuals for early to mid-career innovative contributions to computing. The award carries a prize of $250,000. Financial support is provided by an ...

for breakthrough advances in computer game-playing. In 2021, Silver was elected

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

(FRS) for his contributions to Deep Q-Networks and

. He was elected a Fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

in 2022.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Silver, David 1976 births Living people Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge Computer programmers Go (game) researchers University of Alberta alumni Academics of University College London Google DeepMind Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellows of the Royal Society