DeepMind's AI has used teamwork to beat humans at a first-person shooter

Deep-learning algorithms have already mastered games like Starcraft to beat humans, and now they have shown they can team up to beat us too. The news: In a paper published in Science yesterday, DeepMind showed how it had let AI programs loose in a modified version of the 3D first-person video game Quake III Arena. The team used an algorithm called "For the Win," which trains a host of agents in parallel using reinforcement learning, the technique that lets AI learn which tactics work and which do not (and that famously enabled DeepMind's AI to win at Go). This time, AI agents were trained on around 450,000 games of Capture the Flag, the classic game that involves snatching a flag from your opponent's base while protecting your own. Each agent could only see a first-person view of the maze-like structure, just as a human player would.