Ubisoft Uses AI To Teach a Car To Drive Itself in a Racing Game

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet's DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have studied its use under constraints like those encountered in the game industry. That's presumably why Ubisoft La Forge, game developer Ubisoft's eponymous prototyping space, proposed in a recent paper an algorithm that's able to handle discrete, continuous video game actions in a "principled" and predictable way. They set it loose on a "commercial game" (likely The Crew or The Crew 2, though neither is explicitly mentioned) and report that it's competitive with state-of-the-art benchmark tasks. "Reinforcement Learning applications in video games have recently seen massive advances coming from the research community, with agents trained to play Atari games from pixels or to be competitive with the best players in the world in complicated imperfect information games," wrote the coauthors of a paper describing the work. "These systems have comparatively seen little use within the video game industry, and we believe lack of accessibility to be a major reason behind this. Indeed, really impressive results ... are produced by large research groups with computational resources well beyond what is typically available within video game studios." The Ubisoft team, then, sought to devise a reinforcement learning approach that'd address common challenges in video game development. They note that data sample collection tends to be a lot slower generally, and that there exist time budget constraints over the runtime performance of agents.

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