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AI agents continue to rack up wins in the video game world. Last week, OpenAI's bots were playing Dota 2; this week, it's Quake III, with a team of researchers from Google's DeepMind subsidiary successfully training agents that can beat humans at a game of capture the flag.
As we've seen with previous examples of AI playing video games, the challenge here is training an agent that can navigate a complex 3D environment with imperfect information. DeepMind's researchers used a method of AI training that's also becoming standard: reinforcement learning, which is basically training by trial and error at a huge scale.
Agents are given no instructions on how to play the game, but simply compete against themselves until they work out the strategies needed to win. Usually this means one version of the AI agent playing against an identical clone. DeepMind gave extra depth to this formula by training a whole cohort of 30 agents to introduce a "diversity" of play styles. How many games does it take to train an AI this way? Nearly half a million, each lasting five minutes.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/4/17533898/deepmind-ai-agent-video-game-quake-iii-capture-the-flag
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Monday July 09 2018, @11:26PM (3 children)
Doesn't that sort of make it hard to compare to humans. After all if you can never learn the map, which is a fairly big part of the games, it would be a very different game. A large explanation that humans get better and better is that the map is the same, almost all is known. It never really changes. Walls, doors whatever are always in the same spots. Power ups and weapons are always in the same known spots. The only thing that changes is where players are, but even that is probably not completely true since for various reasons they do tend to appear at about the same places over and over again (good sniping spot, power ups, spawnzones etc), there is a reason you shoot missiles into some rooms just on "random" and get kills. So it's not like it's completely random and they are all fumbling about in the dark.
So with that in mind is watching this like watching a group of aimbots playing? Do they actually miss when they fire or? Normal players tend to miss sometimes. Perhaps the most important question is; Can the AI rocket-jump yet?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 10 2018, @02:03AM (1 child)
And will the AI teabag you and make Stephen Hawking sex talk?
"Yes.
Yes
youwere
naughty.
Take my
tea bag Yes."
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 10 2018, @02:49PM
Teabagging should probably be classified as a form of psychological warfare, it's clearly an important part of the online playing toolkit. It is more of a close combat skill tho since if you snipe you wont run to the other side of the map to do it, or get there in time.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 10 2018, @03:07PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves