New AI Is Capable of Beating Humans at Doom

If there's one thing that humanity used to be able to hang its hat on in the war against our future computer overlords, it's that we could definitely beat the machines in a good old fashioned game of Doom. Now, however, it appears that even that accomplishment is another hubris of humanity. Two students at Carnegie Mellon University have designed an artificial intelligence program that is capable of beating human players in a deathmatch game of 1993's Doom. Guillaume Lample and Devendra Singh Chaplot spent four months developing a program capable of playing first-person shooter games. The program made its debut at VizDoom (an AI competition that centered around the classic shooter) where it took second place despite the fact that their creation managed to beat human participants.