A.I. players master 'Quake III Arena,' manage to outperform humans

Those among us who fear that we've already passed the point of no return when it comes to artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and plotting to murder the human race will likely cite A.I. research company DeepMind's latest experiment as further proof of that notion. Using Id Software's Quake III Arena, DeepMind has managed to train artificial players to be even more effective than their human counterparts. The challenge for DeepMind was not to see if its A.I. agents could defeat human players in battle, but rather if they could work together on procedurally generated levels to complete an objective -- in this case, capture the flag. Because the levels' structure changes each time they play, the agents are unable to simply memorize locations in order to make it to the flag. This forced them to actually learn the strategies needed to win in a similar manner to how human players might improve at the game.