UK Cypriot British artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis has been recognised on the New Year Honours list.

Mr Hassabis is chief executive of DeepMind, which has developed software that can beat human experts at the complex board game Go.

He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for “services to science and technology”.

He said he was “very proud” of his team at DeepMind.

According to the book Greek Cypriots Worldwide a directory of who’s who Demi Hassabis was born in London 27th July 1976 his grandparents from Famagusta and was a  child chess prodigy who achieved master status by the age of 13 and the highest ranked player of his age in the world, the 41-year-old, London-born Cypriot Demi  Hassabis spent his teenage years immersed in the UK gaming scene. After finishing his A-levels early, by 17 he was one of the creators of the hugely successful Theme Park simulation game, in which players designed and managed an amusement park.

He headed to Cambridge, where in 1997 he graduated with a double first and BA honours  in computer science. After working briefly as an artificial intelligence programmer, he founded his own gaming company Elixir Studios.

This was Mr Hassabis’s first brush with corporate funding. Game company Eidos, which created the Lara Croft Tomb Raider series, bought a 5 per cent stake in the company for £600,000, valuing it at £12m.

It was not plain sailing though, as the studio’s first game Republic: The Revolution, a strategy game where the player played the role of a revolutionary out to overthrow a corrupt regime, was repeatedly delayed and reduced in scope. It only received lukewarm reviews. A second game, Evil Genius, where the player builds an island lair, was better received..

Following his graduation Hassabis worked briefly as a Lead AI programmer on the Lionhead Studios title Black & White before founding Elixir Studios in 1998, a 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.

The release of Elixir’s pioneering first game, Republic: The Revolution, was delayed several times due to its ambitious scope. The final game was reduced from its original vision and greeted with lukewarm reviews, receiving a Metacritic score of 62/100. Evil Genius fared much better with a score of 77/100. In April 2005 the intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers and the studio was closed.

Hassabis then left the games industry, switching to cognitive neuroscience, in order to get back to his lifelong passion of developing artificial intelligence technology. Working in the field of autobiographical memory and amnesia he authored several highly cited and influential papers, including his most prominent work to date, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2007. It 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, 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. This work was widely covered in the mainstream media and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year (at number 9) in any field by the journal Science.

Hassabis received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL in 2009 and continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the world renowned Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL and as a visiting scientist jointly at MIT and Harvard.

Hassabis won the world games championship (called the ‘Pentamind’) at the Mind Sports Olympiad a record five times, prior to his retirement from competitive play in 2003, and at the time was regarded as the best all-round games player in the world.[11] He is an expert player of many board games including chess, diplomacy, shogi and poker. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in 2009 for his game design work.

In 2011 he left academia to co-found DeepMind Technologies, a London based machine learning startup.DeepMind was acquired by Google on January 27th, 2014, for a reported $400M .