AI learns to outsmart humans in video games - and real life

Speed around a French village in the video game Gran Turismo and you might spot a Corvette behind you trying to catch your slipstream. “Gran Turismo had a built-in AI existing from the beginning of the game, but it has a very narrow band of performance and it isn’t very good,” said Michael Spranger, chief operating officer of Sony AI. Once you get past a certain level, it doesn’t really entice you anymore.” But now, he said, “this AI is going to put up a fight.” Visit an artificial intelligence laboratory at universities and companies like Sony, Google, Meta, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and it’s not unusual to find AI agents like Sophy racing cars, slinging angry birds at pigs, fighting epic interstellar battles or helping human gamers build new Minecraft worlds -- all part of the job description for computer systems trying to learn how to get smarter in games. In a January paper, a University of Cambridge researcher who built an AI agent to control Pokémon characters argued it could “inspire all sorts of applications that require team management under conditions of extreme uncertainty, including managing a team of doctors, robots or employees in an ever-changing environment, like a pandemic-stricken region or a war zone.” And while that might sound like a kid making a case for playing three more hours of Pokémon Violet, the study of games has been used to advance AI research — and train computers to solve complex problems — since the mid-20th century. “If you use psychology tests, you can take this information to conclude how well they can work together.” Amy Hoover, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who’s built algorithms for the digital card game Hearthstone, said “there really is a reason for studying games” but it is not always easy to explain.