System designed to isolate changes in the pose of a two-dimensional figure
Gaming

Motion Mapper: An AI system for automated animations for video game sprites

In some animated games, different characters can perform the same actions — say, walking, jumping, or casting spells. A new system learned from unlabeled data to transfer such motions from one character to another.
Homer Simpson talking to Anakin Skywalker in a clip from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Gaming

Your Words, Their Voices: How game makers and marketers are cloning voices using AI.

Voice clones — the audio counterpart to deepfaked images — are poised to invade popular media and entertainment. Professionals and amateurs alike are using AI to emulate the voices of human actors, Wired reported.
John Conway's Game of Life
Gaming

Life Is Easier for Big Networks: Neural networks learn better with more parameters.

According to the lottery ticket hypothesis, the bigger the neural network, the more likely some of its weights are initialized to values that are well suited to learning to perform the task at hand. But just how big does it need to be?
Takes from Agence, an interactive VR project
Gaming

RL Agents SOS!: Inside Agence, a reinforcement learning video game.

A new multimedia experience lets audience members help artificially intelligent creatures work together to survive. Agence, an interactive virtual reality (VR) project blends audience participation with reinforcement learning to create an experience that’s half film, half video game.
Different chess moves
Gaming

Chess: The Next Move: Chess masters use AI to test variants of the game.

AI has humbled human chess masters. Now it’s helping them take the game to the next level. DeepMind and retired chess champion Vladimir Kramnik trained AlphaZero, a reinforcement learning model that bested human experts in chess, Go, and Shogi, to play-test changes in the rules.
Takes from videogame Source of Madness
Gaming

Monsters in Motion: Source of Madness is an AI-powered Lovecraftian nightmare.

How do you control a video game that generates a host of unique monsters for every match? With machine learning, naturally. The otherworldly creatures in Source of Madness learn how to target players through reinforcement learning.
Graphs and data related to Plan2Vec
Gaming

Visual Strategies for RL: Plan2Vec helps reinforcement learning with complex tasks.

Reinforcement learning can beat humans at video games, but humans are better at coming up with strategies to master more complex tasks. New work enables neural networks to connect the dots.
Replica of the video game Pac-Man generated by a GAN
Gaming

Playing With GANs: GameGAN generated a fully functional Pac-Man.

Generative adversarial networks don’t just produce pretty pictures. They can build world models, too. A GAN generated a fully functional replica of the classic video game Pac-Man.
Excerpt from The Squire, an AI written short film
Gaming

Here Be Dragons: AI Dungeon 2 generated the script for a short movie.

AI is contributing to paintings, music, and now a whimsical fantasy video. The Squire is an amateur romp through a snowy realm of knights in armor and damsels in distress. The script was composed by AI Dungeon 2, an interactive text-adventure game based on the GPT-2 language model.
Maze action video game Pac-Man
Gaming

Two-Way Winner: MuZero AI masters both video games and board games.

AlphaGo Zero demonstrates superhuman performance playing Go, chess, and shogi. Models like R2D2 do the same playing classic Atari titles. A new approach to deep reinforcement learning is the first to achieve state-of-the-art results playing both board and video games.
Observational dropout
Gaming

Seeing the World Blindfolded: The observational dropout technique, explained

In reinforcement learning, if researchers want an agent to have an internal representation of its environment, they’ll build and train a world model that it can refer to. New research shows that world models can emerge from standard training, rather than needing to be built separately.
AlphaGo playing Go with Lee Sedol
Gaming

Is AI Making Mastery Obsolete?: How human chess and go masters cope with being beaten by AI

Is there any reason to continue playing games that AI has mastered? Ask the former champions who have been toppled by machines.
Robot cooking and serving food
Gaming

A Sleeping Giant Stirs

Sony, the consumer-electronics powerhouse behind the PlayStation and other hit gadgets, is launching three research-and-design centers to focus on AI. Staffing up means competing with — and likely poaching talent from — frontrunners like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Bipedal robot crossing obstacles
Gaming

Survival of the Overfittest

Neuroevolution, which combines neural networks with ideas drawn from Darwin, is gaining momentum. Its advocates claim that they can achieve faster, better results by generating a succession of new models, each slightly different than its predecessors, rather than relying on a purpose-built model.
StarCraft II videogame
Gaming

Take That, Humans!

At the BlizzCon gaming convention last weekend, players of the strategy game StarCraft II stood in line to get walloped by DeepMind’s AI. After training for the better part of a year, the bot has become one of the world’s top players.

Subscribe to The Batch

Stay updated with weekly AI News and Insights delivered to your inbox