Unity Develops Video Game That Tests AI

In the early days of video games where you would be able to go up against AI, over time and with enough practice, you would be able to suss out the AI’s patterns and habits and eventually beat them. However these days AI is getting a lot more sophisticated and smarter, even beating out professionals.

However how smart can AI be? That’s what Unity wanted to find out when they developed a game called Obstacle Tower. This is a game meant to test how smart and sophisticated AI is. It will judge that based on how efficiently an AI can maneuver its way around 100 levels that changes and scales up in difficulty in various ways that makes it hard for AI to predict what will happen next.

Speaking to The Verge, Danny Lange, Unity’s vice president of AI and machine learning said, “We wanted to give the researchers something to really work with that would to an extreme degree challenge the abilities of the AI systems that are currently in research and development around the world. What we really want to do here is create a tool for researchers to focus their work on and unite around and compare progress.”

To that end, the company is offering a $100,000 prize pool that participants can try and claim if their AI is successful.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming, General
Tags: AI (Artificial Intelligence), unity