Look Out, Watson: MIT’s New Videogame Is Training Better A.I.s

March 21, 2011, 2:00pm

Our pal Watson may have bested some of the world’s cleverest meatbags in Jeopardy, but there’s still a long road ahead for scientists hoping to make computers that think like us. Fortunately for the metal ones, MIT has made something that’s designed to help our future machine overlords get started on their path to dominance—and lucky for us humans, it happens to be a pretty fun video game.

Improviso is a game all about the most halting challenge faced by modern AIs: the ability to act in a way similar to humans. Or simply “act” any way at all that’s not based on logic statements.

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Consider for a moment the theatrical performance. An actor’s job is to convincingly express emotion and set tone through gesture and language. These are abilities that come naturally to humans, so it makes sense that a game designed to teach computers how to be human would be a game about acting.

Obviously, machines aren’t going to get their acting lessons the traditional way. In Improviso, two human players act out three consecutive scenes having to do with a crashed alien spaceship. They can use props, text, and various other visual cues to illustrate their performance within the game. Through playing, players get the opportunity to try out improv acting without needing any acting experience.

But the human players aren’t the only ones learning—framed within a game environment free from the complicated subtleties of human body language, the data extracted from Improviso on the exchanges between players is intended to lay the ground work for an elementary understanding of human behavior for computers. Since the game randomly pairs players anonymously, it will eventually become a Turing test of sorts by pairing human players with trained thespian AIs.

Improviso is the next step in a suite of AI training games by MIT’s Gambit Game Lab which already includes The Restaurant Game.

Download it here