EA Created An AI That Taught Itself To Play Battlefield (kotaku.com)

Electronic Arts' Search for Extraordinary Experiences (SEED) Division has created a "self-learning AI-agent" that has managed to teach itself how to play Battlefield 1 multiplayer. From a report: In this blog post, Magnus Nordin from SEED details how his team, inspired by Google's work with old Atari games, wondered "how much effort it would take to have a self-learning agent learn to play a modern and more complex first person AAA game like Battlefield." So they tried to find out. The results are an "agent" that, while inferior to human players, "is pretty proficient at the basic Battlefield gameplay." The agent changes behaviour if it's low on health or ammo, and while more complex behaviours like knowing the details of each map are beyond it (at the moment), EA has found that "while the human players outperformed the agents, it wasn't a complete blowout by any stretch."

Comments

The answer?

[ckatko]

Not that hard. Because they're not trying to mimic human behavior, they're simply trying to win a known system.

This is nothing but a PR puff piece to market EA. Actual people have been doing "AI plays game" for years upon years. YouTube has TONS of channels dedicated to just that.

Re:The answer?

[Kjella]

Not that hard. Because they're not trying to mimic human behavior, they're simply trying to win a known system.

While I agree this article is a puff piece, why does it matter if it wins the "human" way as long as it wins a legal way? While it's possible that some aimbot-like characteristics are far easier for a computer to achieve than an human, it's not cheating if it's man vs machine. It's only cheating if you're pretending it's man vs man. I've played some chess computers playing very "unhuman" chess, but I don't think their victory is any less valid because of that.

Machine learning

[JThundley]

There was that recent story about video games and machine learning and how long it takes humans and AIs to learn to play a custom video game. One of the conclusions they came to was that humans learned their custom video game faster because of societal queues that they already know from outside of the video game. For example, they saw a man and assumed that was their character, saw a ladder and assumed they had to walk over and press up, jump across gaps, jump over what must be bad guys since they have angry faces. Their machine learning bot took a lot longer to learn the game since it was trying to figure out a lot more details about the game than the humans did.

This got me thinking: why hasn't anyone created a more generic AI that learns how to play *TONS* of our old video games? Start them off with older games and work them up to newer and newer ones. This way it would carry all those past experiences and draw upon them when faced with a new and unfamiliar video game. It would have knowledge of the meta of video games. I think this would be awesome, but scary at the same time. Could you imagine an AI that learned everything it knows about humans through video games only?

Re:Machine learning

[KClaisse]

In a lot of ways you have hit at the crux of the AI problem. Another prominent example of this issue is with Automotive AI. We humans bring so much more information to the table besides the basics of how to drive a car and what a road/signs are. We have an ingrained knowledge of what another human being is going to do. We pick up subtle cues from the "body language" of other driver's and use that to inform decisions. That decision making process was created and honed in us as children when we had to understand the intent of our fellow humans. This array of knowledge informs everything we do in life and is, to use your own terms, a kind of "generic AI' that we all share. Its an interesting problem and begs the question: Is this kind of generic AI possible to create without also creating what is essentially a basic consiousness? After all, it is this basic knowledge and understanding that makes us thinking, aware creatures. Its quite a fantastic time to be alive, I can't wait to see what happens next.

Re:Machine learning

[JThundley]

Totally, it's all very interesting. Technology advancements are one of the few things that keep me interested in the future.

You bring up another daydream that I have sometimes. Just like we're talking about raising AI, I think about raising an AI like a baby. I'd imagine to do this, you'd have to give it some kind of a body to operate and sensors to process input from the world. Try to raise it as a person first, and then later try to teach it more advanced things once it sufficiently knows how to act human. Of course, the big problem with this is biology. Humans don't exactly learn all things they know. Some things are intuitive and ingrained in our DNA. We seek out patterns, recognize faces, and feel at least some empathy naturally.

Another train of thought that comes from this is a generic science AI bot. I wonder if something like this could be created with the sole purpose making scientific discoveries. Teach it everything we know about physics and different scientific disciplines, and have it generate experiments that it can simulate and then we can carry out. Maybe I'll see FTL travel in my lifetime!

AI Teaches EA How To Make Actually Good Games

[dryriver]

EA executives, horrified, immediately unplug the AI. EA is saved.

Strange game.

[Kargan]

The only winning move is not to play.