This feels a lot like OpenAI 5, but with a few key differences - for one, it seems to handle randomly generated maps and other unexpected situations, and each agent does not have full knowledge of the others on its team. Really cool!
And it would be hilarious if this ends up giving us video game enemies that don't suck. (Until, of course, someone accidentally creates an RTS AI that manages to 'break out' and conquer the world or something)
>> The agents are never told anything about the rules of the game, yet learn about fundamental game concepts and effectively develop an intuition for CTF.
Here we go again- throwing around big words, "intuition", and marring an otherwise interesting piece of work.
From a cursory glance at the relevant figure, "A look into how our agents represent the game world" - it looks like what is being learned is very much a goood old behaviour tree. For instance, the figure suggests that agents learned to react to situations like "Agent flag at base & opponent flag at base & not respawning & agent in home base". So basically, the condition part of an IF-THEN-ELSE rule.
Why is this called an "intuition" rather than a "rule"? From my reading, the only reason is that it was learned by a deep neural net by reinforcement learning without explicit supervision, i.e. without anyone telling the agent "learn this rule".
That's a very narrow, procrustean, definition of intuition. Is it really what most people would mean by "intuition"? Is it even close? Who knows- nobody can tell what most people would mean by "intuition". There's a dictionary definition, but chances are most people would not know it by heart. So it's very hard to even say "that's not what intuition means"- one would just be begging the question.
So why use such a vague term in an article like this, that is already pretty impressive stuff? What do such meaningless claims add to the result? I don't get it.
Super interesting!
Do these agents evolve to communicate with each other (e.g. by wiggling)?
With OpenAI5, it would have been cool to restrict inter-agent communication to an audio channel. Would a discrete language evolve?