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from the do-robots-dream-of-winning-game-contests? dept.
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.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @06:27AM
Its much easier to write a stable Vulkan driver than a stable OpenGL driver (as least if you bother to optimize it). Also Vulkan is targeted at being a single multi-platform standard, and with the Vulkan portability initiative, it really has a shot. Vulkan is significant progress toward both stability and performance. OpenGL is 26 years old: the reason we don't have stable OpenGL drivers is not because we need to work on it longer, but rather its not a goo match to our current needs and forces very complex optimization efforts. As a graphics programmer, Vulkan has been my first real hope for being able to throw away our DirextX backend, and our OpenGL backend, and our OpenGLES backend, and scrap our plans for a Metal back end, and maybe scrap our plans for porting the GLES to webGL. Vulkan may be a pain to use (its effectively like writing half the driver yourself), but there is actual hope for portable performance and stable projects (since you as the developer of the application can effectivly control the front half of the driver where normally the broken optimization attempts screw everything). Also we get a shader IR so we don't have to use the end users broken shader compiler. This is a huge amount of progress. As an industry we can get to a good place on top of Vulkan far faster than we could stabilize the ever poorer fitting opengl approach.
Now fuck Apple for not supporting Vulkan on IOS, but the Vulkan portability initiative and MoltenVK are here to save the world from their bullshit (and Metal is a good API, so I can't hate them too much).