When asked to create a sorting algorithm, AlphaDev came up with one that was 70 per cent faster than the best for lists of five pieces of data and 1.7 per cent faster for lists of over 250,000 items.

So the computer scientists developed a different type of algorithm that allowed users to more easily define what bad behavior they wanted their program to avoid. This, of course, makes the ...

Myers and his team trained the algorithm with a database of 3,500 different images of rubbish, combining a resource called TrashNet with images from Google.

The sorting algorithm led to improvements that were up to 70% faster than benchmarks for shorter sequences and about 1.7% faster for sequences exceeding 250,000 elements.