Why Playing Hide-and-Seek Could Lead AI to Humanlike Intelligence

Humans are a species that can adapt to environmental challenges, and over eons this has enabled us to biologically evolve -- an essential characteristic found in animals but absent in AI. Although machine learning has made remarkable progress in complex games such as Go and Dota 2, the skills mastered in these arenas do not necessarily generalize to practical applications in real-world scenarios. The goal for a growing number of researchers is to build a machine intelligence that behaves, learns and evolves more like humans. A new paper from San Francisco-based OpenAI proposes that training models in the children's game of hide-and-seek and pitting them against each other in tens of millions of contests results in the models automatically developing humanlike behaviors that increase their intelligence and improve subsequent performance. Hide-and-seek was selected as a fun starting point mostly due to its simple rules, says the paper's first author, OpenAI Researcher Bowen Baker.