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For years, video game developers have used artificial intelligence to animate those characters encountered by a player, but non-playable characters, or NPCs, have been based on sets of rules coded by humans. Using the AI technology du jour, machine learning, future NPCs will program and reprogram their own rules, based on the experiences they encounter in games, in the process getting smarter the longer they play. So says Danny Lange, the VP of AI and machine learning at Unity Technologies, a major maker of game "engine" software that handles the underlying mechanics of titles like Firewatch and ChronoBlade. Today the company announced Unity Machine Learning Agents--open-source software linking its game engine to machine learning programs such as Google's TensorFlow. It will allow non-playable characters, through trial and error, to develop better, more creative strategies than a human could program, says Lange, using a branch of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning.