Researchers at DeepMind, Google's artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary, have made their AI agents able to play and win an online multiplayer game, something impossible to date, and which involves cooperating and competing with other players an "awesome skill" to develop and use independently learned strategies, without human intervention.
This method had proven successful in first-person games with a single player, and two such as chess or Go, but until now had not broken the barrier of the multiplayer stage, where elements such as team play and competition are essential against more than one opponent.
The video game with which this feat has been demonstrated is "Quake III Arena Capture the Flag", a first-person shooter, the study shows that the Google AI can play at the level of a player of flesh and blood, and beat both other artificial intelligences as human players. The artificial intelligences involved in the study were not trained or received information about the game or the players, but learned from their own experience playing, the score obtained and what they "saw" in the pixels on the screen.
Undoubtedly the generated artificial intelligences learned to play from thousands of games that were developed between them and in randomly generated scenarios.