A recent press release reports, “Unity Technologies (https://unity3d.com), creator of the world’s most widely used real-time 3D development platform, today announced the upcoming launch of the Obstacle Tower Challenge: a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence (AI) challenge designed to test the capabilities of intelligent agents and accelerate the research and development of AI. In collaboration with prize sponsor Google Cloud Platform, the Obstacle Tower Challenge will be a new benchmark aimed at testing the vision, control, planning, and generalization abilities of AI systems — capabilities that no other benchmark has tested together before. Participants will have the opportunity to win prizes valued at over $100,000, in the form of cash, travel vouchers, and Google Cloud Platform credits.”

The release goes on, “The Obstacle Tower Challenge is built upon Unity’s Obstacle Tower, a newly released game-like environment intended for machine learning researchers. The Obstacle Tower environment involves a combination of platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems inside a tower setting with potentially endless floors. The Challenge will examine how machines operate in a variety of areas, including computer vision, locomotion skills, and high-level planning, through platform-style gameplay with puzzles and planning problems. ‘Each of the Tower floors is procedurally-generated, which means an AI agent must not only be able to solve a single version of the Tower but any arbitrary version as well. In this way, we’re testing the generalization ability of agents, a key capability that has not often been analyzed by benchmarks in the past,’ said Danny Lange, Vice President of AI and Machine Learning, Unity Technologies. ‘Essentially, with the launch of the Obstacle Tower Challenge, we hope to stimulate new AI research and further the field of reinforcement learning’.”

Read more at Business Wire.

Image used under license from Shutterstock.com