The AI Pinball Player That Could Beat Humans Within 4 Days

Developers have taught artificial intelligence how to play an arcade pinball machine, which learned so quickly it could beat human players within four days. Speaking at Microsoft's developer conference, Build, which is being held virtually this week, Jack Skinner described how he and a team of developers in Sydney used artificial intelligence to control an actual pinball machine. The team took a regular arcade machine and adapted it, using a Windows computer to control the AI software, and a Raspberry Pi to control the flipper mechanism within the pinball machine. Two webcams were mounted on the pinball machine - one pointed at the scoreboard and one pointed down at the table - so that the AI could "see" the table like a human player would. Optical character recognition (OCR) software allowed the computer to read the current score from the pinball machine's electronic display.