Artificial Intelligence Bests Humans At Classic Arcade Games

sciencehabit writes The dream of an artificially intelligent computer that can study a problem and gain expertise all on its own is now reality. A system debuted today by a team of Google researchers is not clever enough to perform surgery or drive a car safely, but it did master several dozen classic arcade games, including Space Invaders and Breakout. In many cases, it surpassed the best human players without ever observing how they play.

Comments

Re:meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, you don't sound like you know what you're talking about.

Nor do you. Your AI doesn't have the same control interface as human players. An AI would never miss a stationary target unless you programmed it to or are really bad at programming. Humans do miss them. Humans have to deal with moving a mouse an exact distance. AIs don't. They simply move the exact distance required. No need to deal with mouse physics, no need to deal with running out of desk space, no need to estimate the amount of movement, etc... They don't need think which key does what then press the key, they just call the proper function. The UIs are completely different even if both have the same available actions.

If you're giving an AI millions of training iterations, you should be giving the human a similar level of training. The AIs trained on top players only learn what they've seen. They don't handle other things very well. Look at just about every released RTS game. When you play a round long enough, the AI mostly stops everything or ends up in a 96% predictable repeating pattern.

Almost no AIs work well in teams. Humans do far, far better.

I'm a RTS AI researcher. It sounds like you do something similar, so you should know that much "advanced academic AI" is also poor. Most papers restrict their game environments so far that their results are almost meaningless. Sure they can calculate optimal attack orders for a 6x6 battle, but there's not enough CPU or memory left to do anything else.

Your AI sounds like a normal case-based, reinforcement leaning AI that trains against itself. What game/paper is it?

Re:Breaking news!

[AmiMoJo]

The key achievement here is that the AI was able to learn the game on its own in a relatively short time. Imagine if you had an industrial robot that could learn how to do tasks on its own and then modify its behaviour if the situation changed, and generally cope with a variety of situations.

Also, they called it DQN which means "dumbass" in Japanese, so bonus points for that.