AI Uses Less Than Two Minutes of Videogame Footage to Recreate Game Engine

Game studios and enthusiasts may soon have a new tool at their disposal to speed up game development and experiment with different styles of play. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new approach using an artificial intelligence to learn a complete game engine, the basic software of a game that governs everything from character movement to rendering graphics. Their AI system watches less than two minutes of gameplay video and then builds its own model of how the game operates by studying the frames and making predictions of future events, such as what path a character will choose or how enemies might react. To get their AI agent to create an accurate predictive model that could account for all the physics of a 2D platform-style game, the team trained the AI on a single "speedrunner" video, where a player heads straight for the goal. This made "the training problem for the AI as difficult as possible."