Demis Hassabis

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Demis Hassabis

Born	1976 (age 31–32)
Occupation	Video Game Producer/Neuroscientist
Nationality	English

Demis Hassabis (born 1976, United Kingdom) is a computer games designer, AI programmer, neuroscientist and world-class games player. A child chess prodigy, he reached master standard at the age of 12 with an ELO rating of 2300, the then highest rating for a boy of that age in the world.^{[citation needed]} After finishing his A-Level exams two years early he began his computer games career at the renowned Bullfrog Productions, first level designing on the cult Syndicate and then at 17 co-creating the classic Theme Park, with famous games designer Peter Molyneux, which went on to sell several million copies and win a coveted Golden Joystick Award. Hassabis then left Bullfrog to take up his place at Queens' College, University of Cambridge where he graduated in Computer Science in 1997 with a Double First.

Following his graduation Hassabis worked briefly as a Lead AI programmer on the ground-breaking Lionhead Studios title Black & White before founding Elixir Studios in 1998, a high profile London-based independent games developer. He grew the company to 60 people, signing publishing deals with Vivendi Universal and Microsoft, and was the executive designer of the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius games.

Elixir Studios gained widespread fame and notoriety in equal measure for the scope and originality of its game concepts and for its pioneering technology. But the release of Elixir's first game, Republic: The Revolution, was delayed several times. The final game was greatly reduced from its original scope and greeted with lukewarm reviews, receiving a Metacritic score of 62/100. Evil Genius fared a bit better with a score of 77/100, but in April of 2005 the closure of Elixir Studios was announced. The intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers in 2005.

Hassabis then left the games industry, switching to cognitive neuroscience, citing a desire to get back to his lifelong passion of developing artificial intelligence technology^[1]. Working in the field of autobiographical memory and amnesia he had several influential and highly cited papers published in 2007 in high-impact journals. His most important work to date was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2007^[2] and demonstrated that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. Importantly this established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall. Based on these findings and a follow-up fMRI study^[3], Hassabis developed his ideas into a new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination^[4]. This work was widely covered in the mainstream media^[5] and well-received by the academic community, culminating in the work being listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year (at number 9) by the prestigious journal Science^[6].