Using Unity to Help Solve Intelligence

By Tom Ward, Andrew Bolt, Nik Hemmings, Simon Carter, Manuel Sanchez, Ricardo Barreira, Seb Noury, Keith Anderson, Jay Lemmon, J. Coe and 3 more. 2020

23 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, our most significant measurement of progress is an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments. Existing platforms for constructing such environments are typically constrained by the technologies they are founded on, and are therefore only able to provide a subset of scenarios necessary to evaluate progress. To overcome these shortcomings, we present our use of Unity, a widely recognized and comprehensive game engine, to create more diverse, complex, virtual simulations. We describe the concepts and components developed to simplify the authoring of these environments, intended for use predominantly in the field of reinforcement learning. We also introduce a practical approach to packaging and re-distributing environments in a way that attempts to improve the robustness and reproducibility of experiment results. To illustrate the versatility of our use of Unity compared to other solutions, we highlight environments already created using our approach from published papers. We hope that others can draw inspiration from how we adapted Unity to our needs, and anticipate increasingly varied and complex environments to emerge from our approach as familiarity grows.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy

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Citations in the corpus

Imitating Interactive Intelligence (2020, methodology): “We have chosen to study artificial agent interactions in a 3D virtual environment based on the Unity game engine (Ward et al., 2020).”