Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
AI Games

EA Created An AI That Taught Itself To Play Battlefield (kotaku.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

EA Created An AI That Taught Itself To Play Battlefield More

EA Created An AI That Taught Itself To Play Battlefield

Comments Filter:

  • I am waiting for Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, e.t.c. to place statements about A.I.

  • The answer? (Score:3)

    by Chris Katko ( 2923353 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @06:11PM (#56316427)

    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: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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.

      • Most old school games don't need aim bots, well people used them anyway.

        E.g. the size of all humans in the game are the same.

        So if you hear one coming around the corner, you exactly know where his head will be. If he is crouching you hear that too, and again you know exactly where his head will be when he comes around the corner.

        You just have to practice a bit for your preferred distance to the corner and you can intuitively head shot everyone coming around it. No aim bot needed at all ... but you likely ge

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fazig ( 2909523 )
          If I remember correctly, even the first Battlefield game had at least some simplistic ballistic simulation, which made it different from your old school first person shooters. What you describe may work for games like Quake or even the newest iteration of Counter Strike, where distances are a lot more predicable and you don't have ballistic simulation. In those 'old school games' you usually also can fire from your hip and have the first shot hit exactly where your augmented reality cross-hairs point toward
  • I programmed an AI when I was at university over a decade ago that was a foul mouthed chatbot. Seems like it's the same thing except it's better at teaching itself new words.

    I'm 99% sure that the majority of game play in Battlefield is actually just 12 year old's screaming at each other. With an Aimbot.

    • Your chat bot was probably more cogent than 90% of the human players.

      Probably didn't call people fags nearly as often, anyway.

  • Machine learning (Score:3)

    by JThundley ( 631154 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @06:29PM (#56316519)

    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by KClaisse ( 1038258 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @06:58PM (#56316689)
      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.

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      societal queues

      I've met people who could benefit from playing a few rounds of Queue Simulator.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Deep Mind did exactly that.

      • Looks like they just had it playing Atari games. I want to see it winning Starcraft tournaments already!

          • I know they've been working on this for a while in both Brood War and SC2, but the bots still aren't good yet.

            Our initial investigations show that our agents perform well on these mini-games. But when it comes to the full game, even strong baseline agents, such as A3C, cannot win a single game against even the easiest built-in AI. For instance, the following video shows an early-stage training agent (left) which fails to keep its workers mining, a task that humans find trivial. After training (right), the agents perform more meaningful actions, but if they are to be competitive, we will need further breakthroughs in deep RL and related areas.

  • What would be really cool is an AI that play a decent commander spot. B2 is a great game I still love it when a good squad gets together, but playing minus a good commander is not nearly as fun, but playing commander is to be honest sort of boring. An active AI commander capable of meeting the needs of squad requests, following a strategy and assisting in the taking of command points could add a HUGE amount of enjoyment to the game. I know many people who play a good commander but it gets boring after a fe

    • I used to play Eve Online.
      A good commander is more worth than a hundred troops, or thousand even. The biggest battles I have been in where about 3000 of our own forces, no idea about the enemy.
      You would be surprised how many of the "good commanders" are Russians. I only remember one American, but he was a Russian immigrate, Makala or something was his name (fleet commander of tripple A).

      Ha ... could now write a long rant about the different ways of how "typical americans" versus "typical russians" versus "t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Archfeld ( 6757 )

        In battlefield, obviously the numbers are much smaller, but a single squad with a good officer under the direction or a good commander can easily swing the game. Conversely a squad with out direction and supplies will generally flail about without success. I never played EVE online so I can't really attest or relate but I did read some about the game.

        • Biggest online game with concurrent players online in the same world (not split into multiple "worlds" or "shards" or "servers")
          Unfortunately much to many "unintuitive" game mechanics.

  • AI Teaches EA How To Make Actually Good Games (Score:3)

    by dryriver ( 1010635 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @06:46PM (#56316633)
    EA executives, horrified, immediately unplug the AI. EA is saved.

  • Unfortunately, after playing for a few hours a licensing glitch caused the AI to be misidentified as a game pirate. The system was blacklisted from all Battlefield 1 servers; and then, once EA's License Enforcement team discovered the IP address was from within the company, they forcibly powered-down the system - leading to the complete loss of the AI.

  • In mmo games they need to do away with taunt as it is built around terrible AI rather than a human DM. Bury it and the "tank" concept and make weaker challenges that fight a hell of a lot better.

  • And dumb automation is all that exists at this time. At best, the statistical classifier used did supervised learning, i.e. somebody with actual intelligence defined a fitness function and then the classifier trained on that function. As basically all intelligence is in that fitness function, the classifier has none and it did not "learn" anything either (because that would require some sort of understanding). It simply conditioned its "reflexes" (if that is not already overstating the amount of "intelligen

  • Looking at the video, specially in first person mode they look exactly like bots.
    Was hoping for something more.
    They follow walls and snap on target basically. Which also creates the bug when each time is being another wall and it loops. They either see through or hear through precisely and don't try to jump over or set explosives on the walls. That's quite basic.

  • I'm pretty sure battlefield 1942 had bots in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Yep. Good job EA, you re invented something you already invented 20 years ago.

  • Strange game. (Score:3)

    by Kargan ( 250092 ) on Friday March 23, 2018 @11:43PM (#56317637) Homepage

    The only winning move is not to play.

  • I would categorise the creation of the first gaming noob as a significant milestone in artificial intelligence

  • How much do you guys get paid to post this marketting crap?

    There is zero "specialness" about a huge company, having some guy employ basic neural nets. The difficulty is not "can AI learn" it's "can AI act like a human" and that's the hard part. THAT is why Quake 3 had ZERO neural nets in their AI.

    This is nothing but a PR blurb.

    There are tons of actual AI videos (and channels!) on YouTube of people teaching AI to play 2-D and 3-D games from scratch. Post those here. But they wont... because nobody is getting

Slashdot Top Deals

Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.

Close