It is official: The machines are going to destroy you — that is, if you are a professional multiplayer gamer.
A team of programmers at a British artificial intelligence (AI) company has designed automated “agents” that taught themselves how to play the seminal first-person shooter Quake III Arena and became so good that they consistently beat human beings.
The work of the researchers from DeepMind, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, was described in a paper published in Science on Thursday and marks the first time the feat has ever been accomplished.
To be sure, computers have been proving their dominance over humans in one-on-one turn-based games such as chess ever since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in 1997.
More recently, a Google AI agent beat the world’s number one Go player in 2017, but the ability to play multiplayer games involving teamwork and interaction in complex environments had remained an insurmountable task.
For the study, the team led by Max Jaderberg worked on a modified version of Quake III Arena, a game that first appeared in 1999, but continues to thrive in competitive gaming tournaments.
The game mode they chose was “capture the flag,” which involves working with teammates to grab the opponent team’s flag while safeguarding your own, forcing players to devise complex strategies mixing aggression and defense.
After the agents had been given time to train themselves up, they matched up their prowess against professional games testers.
“Even after 12 hours of practice, the human game testers were only able to win 25 percent of games against the agent team,” the team wrote.
The agents’ win-loss ratio remained superior even when their reaction times were artificially slowed down to human levels and when their aiming ability was similarly reduced.
The team did not comment on the AI’s potential for future use in military settings.
DeepMind has publicly stated in the past that it is committed to never working on any military or surveillance projects, and the word “shoot” does not appear even once in the paper — shooting is instead described as tagging opponents by pointing a laser gadget at them.
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