Slashdot Mirror
DeepMind's AI Agents Exceed 'Human-Level' Gameplay In Quake III (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: 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. 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. DeepMind's agents not only learned the basic rules of capture the flag, but strategies like guarding your own flag, camping at your opponent's base, and following teammates around so you can gang up on the enemy. "[T]he bot-only teams were most successful, with a 74 percent win probability," reports The Verge. "This compared to 43 percent probability for average human players, and 52 percent probability for strong human players. So: clearly the AI agents are the better players."
I'm sure aimbotting & instantaneous team communication had nothing to do with their success.
But that's a skill-based game, as opposed to strategy or anything needing intelligence. "Skill" as in reaction time to seeing an opponent and successfully moving clicking the mouse of their head. Give me a couple minutes and I can script up a bot that dominates players. That's not hard. And it's not even fun.
To have a real comparison, you'd have to let humans play with cheat-codes. Aim-bots and enemy highlighters. Maybe set it to ultra-slow, or add in bullet-time or something. But at that point, you're no longer playing Quake.
The part where it learned the interface, the objectives, and some strategies on it's own are fun and interesting. The sort of thing I'd expect from an undergrad in comSci. But it's been done and it's not any more impressive than having it learn how to beat MarioBros.
Chess and Go are games that require thought. Quake require twitch.
... we will be hunted to extinction by packs of weaponized roombas.
Video games like Quake, Starcraft II, and DOTA have a limited number of possible moves, and the FASTER player is usually victorious. Bots aren't better players; they're just WAY faster.