DeepMind's Vibrant New Virtual World Trains Flexible AI With Endless Play

Last year, DeepMind researchers wrote that future AI developers may spend less time programming algorithms and more time generating rich virtual worlds in which to train them. In a new paper released this week on the preprint server arXiv, it would seem they're taking the latter part of that prediction very seriously. The paper's authors said they've created an endlessly challenging virtual playground for AI. The world, called XLand, is a vibrant video game managed by an AI overlord and populated by algorithms that must learn the skills to navigate it. The game-managing AI keeps an eye on what the game-playing algorithms are learning and automatically generates new worlds, games, and tasks to continuously confront them with new experiences.