Video games help push the boundaries of AI

In one recent project that used video games to explore artificial intelligence, computer scientists introduced 1,000 AI-driven agents into the game Minecraft and watched as an AI civilization emerged.It included artists, chefs, and explorers.Image credit: Shutterstock/ mkfilm.A few years ago, a group of computer scientists set 25 players loose in Smallville, a custom-made virtual "sandbox world"-an open-ended video game like Minecraft that allows players to freely explore and interact with each other.The catch: The players in Smallville were all virtual, each driven by its own large language model, or LLM.The goal, says Joon Sung Park, who led the project while finishing his PhD at Stanford University in California, was to see what kinds of human-like behaviors evolved.To get the players started, Park and his colleagues wrote a paragraph describing the identity of each.For example, for one they wrote, "John Lin is a pharmacy shopkeeper at the Willow Market and Pharmacy who loves to help people."What happened next was up to the LLMs.In the spring of 2023, the researchers reported on what unfolded over two game days in Smallville (1).The game's AI populace had been surprisingly busy with familiar-seeming tasks."They would wake up in the mornings, go to work, and do all kinds of things," Park says.When one agent was instructed (by a researcher on Park's team) to throw a Valentine's Day party with no further instructions, it issued invitations and began party preparations.Some Smallvillians began asking dates to the party and making plans to get there on time.When one agent told another that it planned to run for mayor, the campaign quickly became a hot topic in Smallville as agents discussed how they planned to vote.The sandbox environment gave Park a way to explore human behavior using LLMs; his study is one of the latest in a long history of using games to push computer technology forward.Some scientists develop games to explain difficult concepts, or even to crowdsource new ideas in a field (2)."When it comes to developing artificial intelligence, games were there from the beginning," says Julian Togelius, a computer scientist and video game researcher at New York University who explores the intersection of AI and video games.Games like chess and Go, he says, gave early researchers a way to test the capabilities of new AI tools-and remain valuable touchstones for new insights (3).