All around us, our perception of learning and intellect is being challenged daily with the advent of new and emerging technologies. From self-driving cars, playing Go and Chess, to computers being able to beat humans at classic Atari games, the advent of a group of technologies we colloquially call Machine Learning have come to dominate a new era in technological growth – a new era of growth that has been compared with the same importance as the discovery of electricity and has already been categorized as the next human technological age.
Games and simulations are no stranger to AI technologies and there are numerous assets available to the Unity developer in order to provide simulated machine intelligence. These technologies include content like Behavior Trees, Finite State Machine, navigation meshes, A*, and other heuristic ways game developers use to simulate intelligence. So, why Machine Learning and why now?
The reason is due in large part to the OpenAI initiative, an initiative that encourages research across academia and the industry to share ideas and research on AI and ML. This has resulted in an explosion of growth in new ideas, methods, and areas for research. This means for games and simulations that we no longer have to fake or simulate intelligence. Now, we can build agents that learn from their environment and even learn to beat their human builders.
This article is an excerpt taken from the book ‘Learn Unity ML-Agents – Fundamentals of Unity Machine Learning’ by Micheal Lanham. In this article, we look at the role that machine learning plays in game development.
Game engines have embraced the idea of incorporating ML into all aspects of its product and not just for use as a game AI. While most developers may try to use ML for gaming, it certainly helps game development in the following areas:
So, we learned about different areas of the gaming world such as model generation, artificial players, NPCs, level generation, etc, where Machine learning can be extensively used.
If you found this post useful, be sure to check out the book ‘Learn Unity ML-Agents – Fundamentals of Unity Machine Learning’ to learn more machine learning concepts in gaming.
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