I have had an awful lot of fun with Google DeepMind's Deep Q-learning algorithm. It plays Atari Breakout solely based on relying the sensory input, and doesn't know anything about the game when starting out.
I have also added a patch to fix the visualization when reloading a pre-trained network. The window will appear after the first evaluation batch is done (typically a few minutes). This configuration is able to run Ilya Kuzovkin's version using less than 1GB VRAM.