To Get Truly Smart, AI Might Need to Play More Video Games

The latest computer games can be fantastically realistic. Surprisingly, these lifelike virtual worlds might have some educational value, too--especially for fledgling AI algorithms. Adrien Gaidon, a computer scientist at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble, France, remembers watching someone play the video game Assassins Creed when he realized that the game's photo-realistic scenery might offer a useful way to teach AI algorithms about the real world. Gaidon is now testing this idea by developing highly realistic 3-D environments for training algorithms how to recognize particular real-world objects or scenarios. The idea is important because cutting-edge AI algorithms need to feed on huge quantities of data in order to learn to perform a task.