Video games have evolved immensely over the past forty years, and for those of us who experienced this evolution first-hand, it can be strange to see how society has come to embrace the medium in recent years. Playing games is actually a viable, and oftentimes even lucrative career choice these days, and not only are games starting to be used for educational purposes, they’re starting to be used for research as well. One area of research where video games have the potential to be especially useful is artificial intelligence, or at least, that’s what a scientist by the name of Adrien Gaiden believes.

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.