OpenAI launches Neural MMO, a massive reinforcement learning simulator

Artificial intelligence that's beastly at World of Warcraft might not lie too far into the distant future, if OpenAI has its way. The San Francisco research nonprofit today released Neural MMO, a "massively multiagent" virtual training ground that plops agents in the middle of an RPG-like world -- one complete with a resource collection mechanic and player versus player combat. "The game genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs) simulates a large ecosystem of a variable number of players competing in persistent and extensive environments," OpenAI wrote in a blog post. "The inclusion of many agents and species leads to better exploration, divergent niche formation, and greater overall competence." AI agents spawn randomly in Neural MMO environments, which contain automatically generated tile maps of a prespecified size. Some tiles are traversable, like "forest" (which bears food) and "grass," while others aren't (such as water and stone).