An artificial intelligence that can remember its previous successes and use them to create new strategies has achieved record high scores on some of the hardest classic Atari video games Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2269085-ai-smashes-video-game-high-scores-by-remembering-its-past-success/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Tag: Atari
DeepMind’s AI Agent MuZero Could Turbocharge YouTube
DeepMind’s latest AI program can attain “superhuman performance” in tasks without needing to be given the rules. From a report: Like the research hub’s earlier artificial intelligence agents, MuZero achieved mastery in dozens of old Atari video games, chess, and the Asian board games of Go and Shogi. But unlike its predecessors, it had to work out their rules for itself….
Thieves’ Guild: a BBS Game With the Best 1990s Pixel Graphics You’ve Never Seen
“The sky is clear, the breeze is strong. A perfect day to make the long sea voyage to Mythyn,” writes BBS history blogger Josh Renaud. “You prepare your galley, hire a crew of sailors, and cast off. But a few hours into your trip, the dreaded words appear: ‘Thou seest rippling waters…'” He’s describing the beginning of a 27-year-old game that…
Remembering the Golden Age of Computer User Groups
Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they’ve written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that “The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it’s far from tech history’s only community gathering centered on CPUs.” Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around…
Gamemakers Inject AI To Develop More Lifelike Characters
moon_unit2 writes: The AI technique that DeepMind used to teach machines to play Atari can now bring new video game characters to life. WIRED reports that researchers at Electronic Arts and the University of British Columbia in Canada developed a reinforcement learning method for animating humanoid characters. The approach feeds on data gathered through motion capture, but then uses reinforcement learning…
Xbox Co-creator Rob Wyatt Sues Atari For Failing To Pay Him for Design of VCS Console
Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt has filed a lawsuit against Atari for failing to pay him for the design work he did in creating the Atari VCS console. From a report: Tin Giant, Wyatt’s company, filed the lawsuit in federal court in Colorado, alleging breach of contract and defamation. Tin Giant said that Atari owes it in excess of $261,720. Wyatt, a…
Ubisoft Uses AI To Teach a Car To Drive Itself in a Racing Game
An anonymous reader shares a report: Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have…
Meet The Programmer Behind Atari’s Legendarily Bad Videogame ‘E.T.’
An anonymous reader quotes The Hustle: Once the most highly coveted game developer — a hit-maker with the Midas touch — he had been immortalized as the man who created E.T., the “worst” video game in history. But Howard Scott Warshaw’s story, like that of Atari, is a parable about corporate greed and the dangers of prioritizing quantity over quality… His…
Researchers Want To Use Mega Man 2 To Evaluate AI
Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. From a report: Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI…
Microchip Pioneer Chuck Peddle, Lead Designer of the Historic 650x Microprocessors, Dies
Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes:
If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the work of electrical engineer Charles “Chuck” Peddle, who died this week. The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost…