AI and Games: The Virtuous Cycle

Ever since the birth of the idea of artificial intelligence (AI), games have been helping AI research to advance. Games not only pose interesting and complex problems for AI to solve, they also offer a rich canvas for creativity and expression. This rare domain where science meets art and interaction offers unique properties for the study of AI and is the key driver of technical progress and AI breakthroughs including deep learning and artificial general intelligence. It is not only AI that advances through games, however; AI has been helping games to advance across several fronts: in the way we play them, in the way we understand their inner functionalities, in the way we design them, and in the way we understand play, interaction and creativity. As games get increasingly richer and more complex through creative AI processes, AI advances further and in turn, it advances the environments it is trained in a continuous virtuous cycle. Video games are arguably the most important domain to develop AI for, while AI is arguably the most important technological leap forward for games.