Firm develops game specially to test capabilities of AI

A famous game development company, Unity Technologies, has designed a new super-hard game solely to challenge the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI).

Along with the game titled ‘Obstacle Tower’, the firm has also released the Obstacle Tower Challenge that will let participants run their AI agents – digital, game-playing embodiments of an AI algorithm – through the 100-level challenge and compete for prizes.

The firm says that Obstacle Tower provides a game-like environment for machine learning researchers to play around and fine-tune their AI agents that will reply on a technique called reinforcement learning, which learns to adopt new behaviors based on programmed rewards, as per Futurism.

The tower operates similar to a standard platforming game. Each floor is itself a unique puzzle that requires the AI to time up its actions, make conclusive decisions, and perform particular tasks to advance further.

Just like usual games, the higher up the tower the AI gets, the more challenging the levels get. In order to ensure that the AI can’t be programmed to solve a certain puzzle, the levels are procedurally generated so they are never exactly the same, detailed Engadget.

Through this game, the researchers will be able to test ‘the vision, control, planning, and generalization abilities of AI agents – capabilities that have yet to be fully tested together’, as per Unity.

“There’s a wide range of control problems, visual problems, and cognitive problems that you have to overcome to progress from level to level, and every level it gets harder,” Unity VP for AI and machine learning Danny Lange told The Verge. “We’ve had human players play and they can get to around level 15.”

Unity Technologies will begin the Obstacle Tower Challenge on February 11. Participants will then be able to run their AI agents through the first 25 levels of the Obstacle Tower, while the second round will initiate in April being open to all 100 levels. Moreover, for the challenge winners there are prizes valued at up to $100,000 awarded.