Arago's AI can now beat some human players at complex civ strategy games

Arago's flagship HIRO AI product plays Freeciv, a free civilization building simulation that's based on the popular and long-lived Sid Meier's Civilization series of games – and it's getting more skilled. Freeciv is a complex, sprawling game with a huge number of possible strategies that can lead to success, especially when playing against unpredictable human opponents, but HIRO can now even best around 80 percent of human players it faces off against, as announced by Arago at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016 on stage. How complicated can it be to succeed at a video game? Well, depending on options you select, as well as variables that can vary dramatically during the many, many turns that normally happen during any given game of Freeciv, the possibly permutations of individual games is 10 to the power of 15,000, meaning you require a very plastic AI indeed to successfully "learn" how to negotiate individual twists and turns. Games prove a common platform for testing and proving AI prowess; Google's AlphaGo is an example that has received a lot of attention for its successes.