Video games might speed up artificial intelligence development

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 Gaiden, 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. Gaiden 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. Sometimes, that isn’t a problem. Facebook, for instance, has millions of labeled photographs with which to train the algorithms that automatically tag friends in uploading images (see “Facebook Creates Software that Matches Faces Almost as Well as You Do”). Likewise, Google is capturing huge amounts of data using its self-driving cars, which is then used to refine the algorithms that control those vehicles.