Unity Technologies has developed a video game that isn't made for human players. Instead, it's designed for artificial intelligence agents.
Called Obstacle Tower, it's a "game-like environment" in which machine learning researchers can test out the capabilities of their AI.
New AI Game
As reported by The Verge, Unity announced Obstacle Tower along with a contest appropriately dubbed the "Obstacle Tower Challenge." The game is pretty much a standard platformer, comprising 100 procedurally generated levels. AIs are tasked with solving every puzzle and challenge they're faced with on each floor and planning out their actions.
Naturally, the difficulty increases as the AI agents move up the tower, but because each level is procedurally generated, they can't simply be programmed or learn specific steps to solve the puzzles to advance. In other words, every stage changes each time they take a crack at it.
"Each of the Tower floors is procedurally-generated, which means an AI agent must not only be able to solve a single version of the Tower but any arbitrary version as well. In this way, we're testing the generalization ability of agents, a key capability that has not often been analyzed by benchmarks in the past," Danny Lange, Unity's vice president of AI and machine learning, said in a press release.
The Obstacle Tower Challenge
The competition consists of two rounds. Round 1 begins on Feb. 11 and ends on March 31, and it's playable only up to the 25th floor. Meanwhile, Round 2 will kick off on April 15 and last until May 24, and all the floors up to the 100th will be open then.
Winners are scheduled to be announced on June 14. As for the prizes, they stand to win $100,000 in cash, travel vouchers, and credits for Google Cloud Platform.
For those who are interested to join, sign-ups are now available on Unity's website.
