If, like me, you spent too much of your youth playing video games, well, at least now you can finally conquer all those games with a little help from artificial intelligence.
Wrap it up: A new Python library provides a way to train a reinforcement-learning algorithm to play just about any old video game. The library works as a wrapper around the popular game emulator MAME. The readme shows how to write a quick program to master the classic Street Fighter 3. Fight!
Go, go: Reinforcement learning is inspired by the way animals seem to learn in response to positive feedback. DeepMind, the subsidiary of Google that aims to develop “artificial general intelligence,” famously used reinforcement learning to train programs to play Atari games. It was also the basis of AlphaGo, a program that proved capable of playing the ancient board game Go with superhuman skill. This was groundbreaking because the game is so complex and difficult to master.
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