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takyon writes:

Unity developed a video game designed to test AI players

Unity, a leading maker of game development tools, announced today that it's created a new, unprecedented type of video game that's designed not to be played by humans, but by artificial intelligence. The game is called Obstacle Tower, and it's a piece of software that's created to judge the level of sophistication of an AI agent by measuring how efficiently it can maneuver up to 100 levels that change and scale in difficulty in unpredictable ways. Each level is procedurally generated, so it changes every time the AI attempts it.

With Obstacle Tower and a $100,000 pool of prizes set aside for participants to claim as part of a contest, Unity hopes it can provide AI researchers with a new benchmarking tool to evaluate self-learning software. "We wanted to give the researchers something to really work with that would to an extreme degree challenge the abilities of the AI systems that are currently in research and development around the world," Danny Lange, Unity's vice president of AI and machine learning, told The Verge. "What we really want to do here is create a tool for researchers to focus their work on and unite around and compare progress."

Press release. Also at Engadget.

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