Unity develops ‘game’ for AI players

Unity, the company behind the Unity engine, has developed a “game-like environment” for AI players called The Obstacle Tower. The game aims to test the capabilities of intelligent algorithms through levels of random difficulty.

Unity explains that the environment tests the AI’s vision, control, and planning and learning ability. Many skills that humans take for granted, a machine has yet to learn, the developer says. That is why Unity has developed the environment. In addition, The Obstacle Tower should serve as a benchmark for AI software programmers and researchers. The hundred levels are procedurally generated and differ in difficulty.

The Obstacle Tower supports the Unity Machine Learning Agents toolkit, an open source SDK with tools for algorithm development. Based on the game environment, Unity will host a competition on February 11 for programmers and the artificial intelligence they developed. The first AI player to complete the hundred levels wins. The prize pool contains one hundred thousand dollars, converted about 87,500 euros.