Sony Built an AI That Can Beat Users at Video Games, With Honor

Japanese tech giant Sony revealed this week that it has trained the toughest-ever opponent for the race-car simulator Gran Turismo -- a champion that can beat top-class e-sports drivers at their own games. From a report: Forged on the battlegrounds of over 1,000 PlayStation 4 consoles, the AI racer-bot has grown smart enough to identify optimal course routes and can execute skilled tactical maneuvers to pass or block competitors, even in vehicular scrum. It does so with ruthless effectiveness -- while still respecting the human etiquette of the game, Sony claims. The company published research on its brainchild -- dubbed Gran Turismo Sophy -- in Nature journal this week. The development process paired 'state-of-the-art, model-free, deep reinforcement learning algorithms with mixed-scenario training to learn an integrated control policy that combines exceptional speed with impressive tactics,' it said. 'In addition, we construct a reward function that enables the agent to be competitive while adhering to racing's important, but under-specified, sportsmanship rules.'

In a media-broadcast demonstration, Sophy bested four of the world's top Gran Turismo drivers in head-to-head contests, proving the tech's superiority to mere mortals. But Sophy's aspiration was never to crush humanity's spirits or to leave it feeling defeated. On the contrary, it was meant to spark fresh excitement in e-sports, especially among elite players who felt they had no challenge left to answer. 'I feel frustrated, that never happened before battling with an AI,' Tomoaki Yamanaka, one of the four racers, said after the loss. 'I drove like I would drive against a human. That's a really amazing thing.'

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