TOP VIDEO GAME DEVELOPER UNITY CAN NOW BE USED TO TRAIN AI

Unity is the most popular cross-platform game engine favoured by video game developers, and the company recently opened up its platform for machine learning researchers to test their algorithms. Reinforcement learning is a strand of machine learning that teaches agents to perform a specific task in a given environment. It has been used for training self-driving cars, robots and even teaching agents to play games like Go and Poker. 

If the bot makes a good move, it is rewarded with a point. Since it has been programmed to collect these points, it will keep repeating these good actions until it learns how to perform a function. Transferring the skills learned digitally to real life is difficult, and it helps if the bot has been trained in a realistic rendering of its physical environment.

“At Unity, we wanted to design a system that provides greater flexibility and ease-of-use to the growing groups interested in applying machine learning to developing intelligent agents. Moreover, we wanted to do this while taking advantage of the high-quality physics and graphics, and simple yet powerful developer control provided by the Unity Engine and Editor,” the company said in a blog post.

The platform, known as Unity Machine Learning Agents, includes additional features like the Agent Monitor class, which allows researchers to better understand how agents make decisions so that mistakes are easier to debug. There is a slight tradeoff for having prettier graphics and more complex environments – it makes it more difficult for the algorithms to comprehend the playing field, and requires more processing power from accelerators such as GPUs, so it’ll be more expensive to train agents. 

The beta for Unity Machine Learning Agents is available on Github here and currently supports Windows, Mac and Linux®.