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

Breaking news!

[penguinoid]

Someone made a computer that's really good at reaction time, and at calculating trajectories.

Re:Breaking news!

[Dutch Gun]

Seriously, is there any doubt that a computer can easily defeat a human at a computer game that involves 95% pure reflexes and 5% strategy?

The article shows a picture of Breakout, and tends to focus on the wrong things entirely... especially the title, trumping that "computers can beat humans". It's fairly impressive that computers can learn the rules of a simple videogame on their own and perform well, but beating humans is not exactly an apples to apples comparison, because while we can formulate strategies to maximize points, we're also prone to making simple mistakes due to our much poorer reflexes and coordination. So AI has a massive advantage with precision reflexes and calculations that it can make much faster than humans.

Some of my previous jobs involved programmed AI game opponents for action games. As anyone who's faced an aim-bot knows, there's no real challenge for computers to perform many of the tasks humans find difficult, like putting a bullet through a moving target's forehead. I actually had do a lot of extra work to programmatically replicate the difficulties humans face when aiming at a moving target. However, collecting and processing global environmental knowledge and formulating complex strategies based on that knowledge is extremely difficult. That's why we typically build a lot of invisible hints into the environment itself for the benefit of AI, such as pathfinding-specific structures, or dynamic flags that signal potential rewards or danger. Even today, in many strategy games that involve complex ruleset (meaning brute force calculations can't work as well), the computer opponents inevitably have to cheat in order to compete with even modestly skilled players.

Early videogames have very few of these sorts of challenges because of their largely static environments and the basic nature of the games. For the most part, you just need to formulate a few simple rules for an optimal victory condition, and when combined with a computer's incredible performance, you can easily trounce the best human players, simply because a computer never gets distracted, tired, or makes silly mistakes in judgement.

Again, I'm not dissing the work the researchers did, which I found to be impressive, but the article and summary seem to be missing the point entirely by comparing them to human scores. It's fairly obvious that once a computer learns how to play with an optimal strategy, it's an absolute given that they'll score better than humans ever could.

I'm one step ahead

[Tablizer]

Well, I outsourced my Donkey Kong playing before bots took it over, so there!

Don't underestimate humans

[K3rn3lPan1c]

Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

Re:meh

[vux984]

This just in: Even in simplistic AAA games with bots, the AIs are better than human players, we have to dumb them down to keep the game fun.

First the prime challenge in the games you are talking about is lining up a crosshair with a pixel with a mouse and selecting fire.

If AI's had to do that they might have some difficulty. In practice the so-called AI bots already know where you are, and could keep their weapon lined up on your noggin through half the map without the need for line of sight. Tthey also get to target and fire at me without having to diddle around with a mouse or looking at the screen to see where I am.

Get a bot to actually play such a game with the same UI and world view I have (keyboard and mouse and what they can see on screen and hear on the speakers) and they tend to be quite abysmal.

Second, switch over to RTS games... and there the only way to give the AI any challenge is to stack the deck in its favor... whether its StarCraft or Supreme Commander or Wargame: Red Dragon. Or in a 4X game like Masters of Orion etc... we've yet to see an AI even really challenge a human being without giving it scripts to follow and extra resources to use.

Re:meh

[Cytotoxic]

When Id released Quake C, this "you have to dumb down the AI" idea became very apparent. Someone wrote a replacement AI for the enemies that allowed them to learn and communicate. They had to follow the rules and physics of the game - so if they were within earshot they could communicate your position to each other, otherwise they couldn't.

The first couple of interactions would be pretty easy kills. Then one enemy would see that you were better armed and run away. That would be the last enemy you would see for a while. Then, when you were in a vulnerable position, the entire population of the level would ambush you in a coordinated attack. Game over. They were way, way, way too smart to be beaten. It was pretty fun to explore their learning capabilities and watch how they would win. But it didn't make for engaging gameplay, unless you are a complete masochist.

The same AI was applied to deathmatch player bots. They had no prior knowledge of the level, or strategies for playing the game. The first few kills were very easy as they figured out what to do. But as they learned your tendencies, they would very quickly evolve into a circle-strafe master. They also learned the map layout pretty quickly, including drop sites and periods for weapons and health. They would then time their circle-strafe to always be on the spawn site immediately as the health or ammo spawned. They would invariably win against even the best human players by monopolizing all of the supplies and winning a war of attrition. Very impressive to watch.

This "AI" program was very rudimentary, and it was already much too difficult for human players, despite being limited to the same "in game" knowledge and input capabilities as the human players. It makes perfect sense that the challenge and complexity of programming the AI for games mostly revolves around "dumbing down" the AI in a way that makes the enemies challenging and interesting, but also the right amount of "beatable".