Rise of the machines: AI thrashes humans in multiplayer shooter 'Quake III Arena'

WASHINGTON - It's official: the machines are going to destroy you (if, that is, you're a professional gamer). A team of programmers at a British artificial intelligence company has designed automated "agents" that taught themselves how to play the seminal first-person shooter "Quake III Arena," and became so good they consistently beat human opponents. The work of the researchers from DeepMind, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., was described in a paper published in Science on Thursday and marks the first time the feat has ever been accomplished. To be sure, computers have been proving their dominance over humans in one-on-one turn-based games such as chess ever since IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. More recently, a Google AI agent beat the world's No. 1 go player in 2017.