Google AI Plays Games You Tell It To
Video games are meant to be played, right? Who wants to hand over the controller to a computer program? Well, Google is developing something called SIMA (Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent) that lets you do just that. This AI can take your natural language commands and play the game for you. Imagine telling your character to "turn left" and SIMA actually does it!
This project comes from Google DeepMind, the company's AI division. They say SIMA is the first AI that can understand your instructions in 3D video game worlds. To train it, they worked with a bunch of game studios, including the folks behind No Man's Sky and Teardown. They threw all sorts of games at SIMA to make it a well-rounded gamer. Google even built a special training area where SIMA could practice physics and object manipulation by, well, manipulating objects!
The coolest thing about SIMA is that it doesn't need any special access to the games themselves. It just uses what it sees on the screen and your commands to figure things out. So far, SIMA can handle over 600 basic moves, like turning corners, picking things up, and navigating menus. However, it's still under development, especially when it comes to more complex stuff. Telling it to "climb that ladder" is easy, but explaining how to "mine resources to build a shelter" is a whole different story. This seems to be a challenge for AI in general - they're great at following simple instructions but struggle with anything that requires a bit more thinking on their own.
Despite these limitations, Google DeepMind is happy with SIMA's progress. They say it performs way better than AI trained on just one game. Apparently, SIMA can even tackle a game it's never seen before, which is pretty impressive!
While we can't play with SIMA yet, there are some interesting possibilities. Imagine gamers with disabilities using SIMA to control their characters by simply telling it what to do. That would be a game-changer! Of course, Google's ultimate goal is for SIMA to play games entirely on its own. This could be useful for repetitive tasks like grinding for levels or money, but it also makes you wonder: what's the point of playing a game if you don't actually play it?
This isn't Google's first foray into AI gaming. Last month, they revealed a program that could create 2D platformer games based on your descriptions. Maybe someday soon, we'll have a Google Gaming service where you tell the AI what kind of game you want, and it not only creates it but plays it for you too. Sounds kind of fun, but not really the same as playing yourself, does it?
