Best Releases and Papers from OpenAI in 2019 So Far

This paper by Joseph Suarez, Yilun Du, Phillip Isola, and Igor Mordatch shows their use of a gaming system to suggest and conduct research on how complex life on earth might have started. In this case, the team turned a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) into an artificially intelligent research environment, with all of the right characteristics to encourage this microcosm. Their results show how groups break up in different ways to avoid competition: "population size magnifies and incentivizes the development of skillful behaviors and results in agents that outcompete agents trained in smaller populations," and "the policies of agents with unshared weights naturally diverge to fill different niches in order to avoid competition."