Artificial Intelligence Agent outplays human and the in Game AI in Doom Video Game

An artificial intelligence agent developed by two Carnegie Mellon University computer science students has proven to be the game's ultimate survivor --, outplaying both the game's built-in AI agents and human players. The students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, used deep-learning techniques to train the AI agent to negotiate the game's 3-D environment, still challenging after more than two decades because players must act based only on the portion of the game visible on the screen. Their work follows the groundbreaking work of Google's DeepMind, which used deep-learning methods to master two-dimensional Atari 2600 videogames and, earlier this year, defeat a world-class professional player in the board game Go. In contrast to the limited information provided in Doom, both Atari and Go give players a view of the entire playing field. "The fact that their bot could actually compete with average human beings is impressive," said Ruslan Salakhutdinov, an associate professor of machine learning who was not involved in the student project.