Video games are the fruit fly of artificial intelligence research. There’s a fair amount to unpack from that statement, so let’s just dive right in.

Artificial intelligence - or AI - is undoubtedly a buzzphrase (haha, because flies) at the moment, and it’s only gaining more momentum as research grows. As that research grows and more people recognize its potential, it’s probably not too outlandish to think AI will be wriggling its way into more and more corners of our daily lives.

Within this field, researchers and AI developers alike are continuously looking to create AI systems - or “agents” - that are as capable and intelligent as possible, an endeavor referred to as the ‘Policy Problem.’ According to a research paper published last month by some researchers at DeepMind - Google’s AI company - describes this concept further:

And in order to do this, researchers are tapping into the glory of video games.

In short, the ‘Policy Problem’ entails the search for (super) human-level AI behavior in the vast space of all possible strategies (also known as policies in the reinforcement learning literature) that can be learned by an artificial agent.

But Why A Fruit Fly?

Here’s a brief biology/genetics/neuroscience lesson - bear with me. You may have come across that “cloning fruit flies” phrase which often crops up in pop culture. I for one never questioned why it was a fruit fly of all things, but it turns out they occupy a major role in scientific research.

Commonly referred to by their scientific name Drosophila melanogaster, these tiny little guys serve as a really useful experimental model for a wide range of research fields. This includes human research, thanks to the surprising fact that there are a fair amount of genetic and anatomical similarities between us and these flies. As such, they - along with mice - have become the established go-to as ways of studying human conditions, thereby strengthening our understanding thereof.

Yet Another Reason Why Video Games Are Great

The Significance Of Chess & Go

StarCraft & Dota 2

Source: Omidshafiei et al., 2020

an accessible, familiar, and relatively simple experimental technology that nonetheless can be used productively to produce valid knowledge about other, more complex systems.

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