With all the apocalyptic movies being shown currently, especially ones about Artificial Intelligence, it might make sense to pay attention to the robots, and how smart AI is becoming.

We know that while Robots are great at carrying out all the simple and repeatable tasks that we only do because we can’t find better one’s AI is rapidly becoming better and faster at doing all the smarter tasks as well.

New Development in AI

To illustrate, this the Gaming company NVIDIA recently demonstrated an AI program that was able to create its own version of the software that powers Pacman in just four days, just by watching the gameplay

That’s an extremely difficult task and probably few humans would be able to do it in that short period. So what can we do with this?

Possible benefits of new AI technology:

The tool could be used to help generate levels and other game aspects
It also has applications in generating algorithms outside of video games

So how does it work?

The AI is able to absorb the games visually, i.e. it can “see what happens” as well as whatever the players enter into the game. It can then create its own code that does the same thing and makes it into a playable game.

Nvidia says it will make the AI’s recreation of Pacman available to play for free online.

According to The Verge, Nvidia’s vice president of simulation technology, Rev Lebaredian, said:

‘It learns all of these things just by watching,’ ‘[It’s] similar to how a human programmer can watch many episodes of Pacman on YouTube and infer what the rules of the games are and reconstruct them.’

It so happens that using AI to generate games or virtual worlds isn’t a brand new concept, but (according to the Verge), Nvidia’s AI improves on previous attempts in several ways.

Nvidia has introduced a ‘memory module’ system – which lets the AI store a map of the game

It can also differentiate between static and dynamic aspects of a game.

Possible benefits of new AI technology

Nvidia says that the AI could be used to help blend elements of different games or design different levels. AI could even be used outside the video game world to develop algorithms (computer codes), e.g. design navigation algorithms by watching robotic trolleys. In addition AI could be used for making programming easier.

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