Unity Technologies, creator of the world's most widely used real-time 3D development platform, recently announced the imminent launch of The initiative Obstacle Tower Challenge in partnership with Google Cloud Platform, the main sponsor.
This is a unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenge designed to test the capabilities of intelligent agents and accelerate research and development in the area of AI and Machine Learning (ML).
The Obstacle Tower Challenge the challenge between AI
"The Obstacle Tower Challenge" was designed around an environment that manages the Unity ML-Agents toolkit to push the boundaries of the human-machine relationship and examine the operation of machines in various fields.
In particular, it should serve as a reference for testing the response, generalization, high-level planning, vision, and control capabilities of AI systems.
This challenge is based on a recently released game environment with 100 levels whose difficulty evolves in real time.
It combines platform-like gameplay with puzzles and puzzle solving within a tower with potentially endless stages, while incorporating enemies and traps.
The AI that will fight in the Obstacle Tower will have to constantly adapt to complete a level.
Since the game offers a third-person experience, the AI that manages to overcome it must have a good awareness of its spatial representation in the game environment.
Danny Lange, Vice President of AI and ML at Unity Technologies, said: "Each of the tower floors is procedurally generated, which means that an AI agent must not only be able to solve a single version of the tower, but also any arbitrary version."
He said Unity wanted to "give researchers something that they could really work with, which would put a strain on the capabilities of artificial intelligence systems currently under development around the world."
Participants in this challenge will have a chance to win many prizes.
The winner will be awarded $ 10,000 in cash, up to $ 2,500 to travel to an IA / ML conference, and coupons redeemable on the Google Cloud platform.
The total value of cash or in-kind rewards to be awarded in this challenge is greater than $ 100,000.
The Unity Obstacle Tower Challenge is expected to officially begin on February 11, 2019, with the first 25 levels available by March 31, 2019.
All levels should not be available until April 15, 2019. Approval note Winners will be announced on June 14.
About the Unity Playground project
On the other hand, Unity is aware that one of the greatest difficulties in creating a video game is understanding the programming.
Even in game engines like Unity, the need to write lines of code is felt very quickly even when the engine offers an alternative like the model in Unreal Engine.
That is why the people of Unity have decided to launch Unity Playground which is a new project, available in the Unity resource store for facilitate the creation of a video game by facilitating the approach to logic that is usually implemented through code.
A project for young enthusiasts
Therefore, With Unity Playground, children and teachers can participate in creating a game, either for educational purposes or as a hobby.
The project includes a set of components that can be used as building blocks to implement any game.
These components are simplified to the maximum so as not to overwhelm the user. In addition, six games are incorporated to serve as an example:
- a defense game
- a soccer game for two players
- a maze
- a clone of Lunar Lander
- a roguelike that includes a simple crafting and inventory system
- An adventure and collection game.
The project can also be found at GitHub (under the MIT license) and it is possible to contribute.