Games also offer a useful testbed for AI - including for some real-world applications in robotics or health care - that's safer to try in a virtual world, said Vanessa Volz, an AI researcher at the Danish startup Modl.ai, which builds AI systems for game development. "People aren't always understanding that the point is about the optimization method rather than the game," she said.
"If you use psychology tests, you can take this information to conclude how well they can work together."Īmy Hoover, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who's built algorithms for the digital card game Hearthstone, said "there really is a reason for studying games" but it is not always easy to explain. While it "goes without stating" that real humans behave quite differently from fictional video game creatures, "the core ideas can still be used," Sarantinos said.
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Researchers hope some of their learnings could eventually play a role in real-world technology, such as how to get a home robot to take on certain chores without having to program it to do so. Microsoft, which owns the popular Minecraft game franchise as well as the Xbox game system, has tasked AI agents with a variety of activities - from steering clear of lava to chopping trees and making furnaces. In the web-based Pokemon Showdown battle simulator, Sarantinos developed an algorithm to analyze a team of six Pokemon - predicting how they would perform based on all the possible battle scenarios ahead of them and their comparative strengths and weaknesses. "Reality is like a super-complicated game," said Nicholas Sarantinos, who authored the Pokemon paper and recently turned down a doctoral offer at Oxford University to start an AI company aiming to help corporate workplaces set up more collaborative teams. Now a new branch of research is more focused on performing open-ended tasks in complex worlds and interacting with humans, not just for the purpose of beating them. Initially, AI was used on games like checkers and chess to test at winning strategy games.
In a January paper, a University of Cambridge researcher who built an AI agent to control Pokemon characters argued it could "inspire all sorts of applications that require team management under conditions of extreme uncertainty, including managing a team of doctors, robots or employees in an ever-changing environment, like a pandemic-stricken region or a war zone."Īnd while that might sound like a kid making a case for playing three more hours of Pokemon Violet, the study of games has been used to advance AI research - and train computers to solve complex problems - since the mid-20th century. Visit an artificial intelligence laboratory at universities and companies like Sony, Google, Meta, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and it's not unusual to find AI agents like Sophy racing cars, slinging angry birds at pigs, fighting epic interstellar battles or helping human gamers build new Minecraft worlds - all part of the job description for computer systems trying to learn how to get smarter in games.īut in some instances, they are also trying to learn how to get smarter in the real world. Once you get past a certain level, it doesn't really entice you anymore."īut now, he said, "this AI is going to put up a fight." "Gran Turismo had a built-in AI existing from the beginning of the game, but it has a very narrow band of performance and it isn't very good," said Michael Spranger, chief operating officer of Sony AI.
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Gran Turismo players have been competing against computer-generated racecars since the franchise launched in the 1990s, but the new AI driver that was unleashed last week on Gran Turismo 7 is smarter and faster because it's been trained using the latest AI methods. The technique of using the draft of an opponent's racecar to speed up and overtake them is one favored by skilled players of PlayStation's realistic racing game.īut this Corvette driver is not being controlled by a human - it's GT Sophy, a powerful artificial intelligence agent built by PlayStation-maker Sony.
Speed around a French village in the video game Gran Turismo and you might spot a Corvette behind you trying to catch your slipstream.
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