A competition to create an artificial enemy with more human qualities and behaviors has finally produced a winner.
The annual BotPrize competition, sponsored by 2K Games, pits teams of computer science engineers and programmers against each other to build a "bot" that can exhibit the same mannerisms and behaviors as a real human player. This year, two teams broke the 50 percent human-computer barrier in the 14-year-old competition with their entries and the team from the University of Texas at Austin won the competition with their bot.
The "UT^2" bot actually fooled a series of players and judges in a game of Unreal Tournament 2004 into believing they were playing a human opponent. It was able to accomplish this long sought-after feat by overcoming many of the mannerisms that make AI driven bots so recognizable such as repeating mistakes and exhibiting ridiculously high levels of efficiency and accuracy.
The goal of the contest isn't just to find ways to make better artificial enemies in video games. These bots could also improve military training technology to create more human-like enemies in training simulators or even give robotic beings more human-like qualities.