Gaming

The next generation of video games could be filled with AI-generated text, speech, characters, and background art. Nvidia announced a system that enables players to converse directly with in-game characters. Meanwhile, game developers are using generative AI to produce media assets.

Both transformers and reinforcement learning models are notoriously data-hungry. They may be less so when they work together. Vincent Micheli and colleagues at the University of Geneva trained a transformer-based system to simulate Atari games using a small amount of gameplay.

Reinforcement learning is powering a new generation of video game cheaters. Players of Rocket League, a video game that ranks among the world’s most popular esports, are getting trounced by cheaters who use AI models originally developed to train contestants.

A new algorithm defeated a championship-winning Go model using moves that even a middling human player could counter. Researchers trained a model to defeat KataGo, an open source Go-playing system that has beaten top human players.

Researchers took a step toward achieving a longstanding goal: One model that performs a whole lot of very different tasks. Scott Reed, Konrad Żołna, Emilio Parisotto and a team at DeepMind announced Gato.

DeepMind’s AlphaGo famously dominated Go, a game in which players can see the state of play at all times. A new AI system demonstrated similar mastery of bridge, in which crucial information remains hidden.

A video game studio is looking to machine learning to cut the effort and expense of populating three-dimensional scenes with animated animals.

Armchair speed demons have a new nemesis. Peter Wurman and a team at Sony developed Gran Turismo Sophy (GT Sophy), a reinforcement learning model that defeated human champions of Gran Turismo Sport, a PlayStation game that simulates auto races right down to tire friction and air resistance.

Musicians and filmmakers adopted AI as a standard part of the audio-production toolbox. What happened: Professional media makers embraced neural networks that generate new sounds and modify old ones. Voice actors bristled.

The previous state-of-the-art model for playing vintage Atari games took advantage of a number of advances in reinforcement learning (RL). The new champion is a basic RL architecture plus a trick borrowed from image generation.

Gamers looking to cheat in first-person shooters can’t miss with AI-assisted marksmanship. A video-game hack uses computer vision to blast virtual enemies at superhuman speed, Ars Technica reported.

Neural networks have learned to play video games like Dota 2 via reinforcement learning by playing for the equivalent of thousands of years (compressed into far less time). In new work, an automated player learned not by playing for millennia but by watching a few days’ worth of recorded gameplay.

A hybrid of deep learning and symbolic AI took the prize at a major puzzle competition. A system called Dr. Fill outscored nearly 1,300 human contestants at April’s annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Ideally, real-time 3D applications such as virtual and augmented reality transition smoothly between different viewpoints of a scene — but generating a fresh perspective can take time. New research speeds the process.

In the open-ended video game Minecraft, players extract blocks of virtual materials from a 3D environment to assemble objects of their own design, from trees to cathedrals. Researchers trained neural networks to generate these structures.