A Google DeepMind artificial intelligence model can play different open-world video games including No Man's Sky like a human, by watching video from a screen, which could be a step towards generally intelligent AIs that operate in the corporeal world. Playing video games has long been a way to test the progress of AI systems, such as Google DeepMind's AI mastery of chess or Go, but these games have obvious ways to win or lose, making it relatively straightforward to train an AI to succeed at them. Open-world games with extraneous information that can be ignored and more abstract objectives, such as Minecraft, are harder for AI systems to crack. Because the array of choices available in the games makes them a little more like normal life, they are thought to be an important stepping stone towards training AI agents that could do jobs in the real world, such as control robots, and artificial general intelligence. Now, researchers at Google DeepMind have developed an AI they call a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, or SIMA, which can play nine different video games and virtual environments it hasn't seen before using just the video feed from the game.

One of the more famous scenes in recent video-game history can be found at the beginning of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, from 2017. The player's avatar, Link, starts on a plateau high above the land of Hyrule. It's a test zone in which to familiarize oneself with the mechanics of the game. But a paraglider tool, obtained at the end of the introduction, makes it possible to leave the plateau behind and enter the rest of the environment. After exiting a cavern, Link stands at the lip of a cliff, and the camera pans out to survey the vast landscape, a patchwork of forests, rolling hills, seas of fog, and darkened mountains. Like Simba in "The Lion King," the player gets the sense that everything the light touches is her kingdom, a sprawling natural world explorable from end to end.

For years, open-world video games, where players can explore all around the map rather than following a set path, have been hugely popular. The Pokémon franchise is finally catching up.