Actually what the article isn't super clear on is that the deepmind Atari 2600 learner knew nothing about aliens, balls, bats, bullets, left, right, up or down

Actually what the article isn't super clear on is that the deepmind Atari 2600 learner knew nothing about aliens, balls, bats, bullets, left, right, up or down ... it was simply given the visual display (downsampled) as input, and was given a +ve or -ve reinforcement when something good or bad happened in the game. Someone (not me) reconstructed the code [1] from the original publication [2]. [1] https://github.com/kuz/DeepMind-Atari-Deep-Q-Learner https://github.com/kuz/DeepMind-Atari-Deep-Q-Learner [2] https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf