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June 1, 2019 03:34 pm

DeepMind's AI Beats Humans At Quake III Arena

"A team of programmers at a British artificial intelligence company has designed automated 'agents' that taught themselves how to play the seminal first-person shooter Quake III Arena, and became so good they consistently beat human beings," reports AFP: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... "Even after 12 hours of practice, the human game testers were only able to win 25% 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, however, 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). Moving forward, Jaderberg said his team would like to explore having the agents play in the full version of Quake III Arena and find ways his AI could work on problems outside of computer games. "We use games, like Capture the Flag, as challenging environments to explore general concepts such as planning, strategy and memory, which we believe are essential to the development of algorithms that can be used to help solve real-world problems," he said. DeepMind's agents "individually played around 450,000 games of capture the flag, the equivalent of roughly four years of experience," reports VentureBeat. But that was enough to make them consistently better than human players, according to Ars Technica. "The only time humans beat a pair of bots was when they were part of a human-bot team, and even then, they typically won only five percent of their matches..." "Humans' visual abilities made them better snipers. But at close range, [DeepMind's team FTW] excelled in combat, in part because its reaction time was half that of a human's, and in part because its accuracy was 80 percent compared to the humans' 50 percent."

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