'StarCraft' AI Tournament: Facebook Gets Beaten By Single-Coder AI Bots
Lately, Facebook has made its presence known in several areas. They have been reported to be working on a streaming service of their own and promoting virtual reality. Most recently, it seems that the social networking giant is attempting to catch up to Google in the race of artificial intelligence (AI), as they have entered their own bot in a "StarCraft" tournament, where it, unfortunately, did not win the top spot.
According to WIRED, Facebook entered their own AI under the name of CherryPi. Considering that the competition is meant to be a "Starcraft" tournament meant for bots, many hobbyists and programmers also entered the tournament.
In the past few years, the game has become a popular training ground for AI bots, as it features the complexity and challenge that they would have to face in the real world. In the "StarCraft" tournament, the final results revealed that Facebook placed sixth out of 28 players.
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Facebook's CherryPi was built and developed by a team of eight programmers, who are affiliated with the social network giant's AI research lab. In comparison, the winning bot, named ZZKbot, was built by a single programmer.
Although the programmer said that it was never expected to win the tournament because of a messy source code, he also believes that single coders like him might not be able to win future tournaments, especially if tech giants have taken a special interest in the annual "StarCaft" event.
Despite the dominance and impressive support that big corporations receive to develop AI technology, fans are still encouraged to try their hand on it. Google and game developer Blizzard has previously released an AI toolset that hobbyists and programmers can use to tinker with and develop their own competitor bot for the next annual tournament. Furthermore, ti can also be used to develop a research AI.
