He also was never expecting the video to gain as much attention as it did. “I don’t know why I never thought to look into it if I’d gone down their path I might have ended up with the same results,” he says. Though Albert apologized on Smogon “for making it seem in my video that is the first bot of its kind or the first to get as far as it did,” (as well as detailing where the two projects take different approaches) he says that ultimately he’s glad he didn’t know that other people had already attempted his project. Their AI beat Technical Machine in a best of three and was able to reach a rating of between 1,250 and 1,350 - again, around the top 30 percent.įuture Sight AI ranked at 1,550 on average during testing. More recently, a user on Pokémon community forum Smogon going by pmariglia shared another attempt. Onmabd’s AI managed to reach 1,300, which would put it in the top 30 percent. However, during his creation process, Albert found that the average player’s ranking settles at around 1,170.
There’s no public way to view the data, and it changes over time, so it’s tricky to evaluate what a “good” rank is. Comments indicated that it was “one of the stronger bots to date.” The competitive ladder gives players a ranking of 1,000 to begin with, which then goes up or down depending on wins and losses. One Reddit comment, however, stated that “Technical Machine at its smartest was still leagues worse than a normal player.”Īnother example was posted on Reddit in 2015 by a user who went by onmabd. Additionally, at the time of its release, the competitive ladder base was not established in the same way, so it’s difficult to tell how successful Technical Machine was overall. Though it was updated through 2019, Technical Machine only ever fully supported Pokémon up to Generation 4 and did not create its own teams, one of the key features of Future Sight.
Earlier projects are not as well documented as Albert’s, though there have been a few varying success levels that gained some attention within the community.Īn early example was Technical Machine, first created in 2010. His step-by-step approach means that he actually wasn’t aware of previous attempts to make similar AIs. Nowadays, for example, he knows Node.js so well that he can use it in projects at his day job, too. Just keep doing that until you get somewhere,” he says. “This is such a bad reference but there’s that song in Frozen 2, called ‘ The Next Right.
He says he wanted to learn new skills and simply broke them down into small enough tasks until he was able to create his vision. One thing leading to another is a pretty good summary of Albert’s work on Future Sight AI. “One thing led to another and then I ended up with an AI on my hands.” I hadn’t touched that at all before I started this project.”
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“The main software that it runs on is called Node.js. “I took classes in college about machine learning, the real question is: was I paying attention?” he laughs. That’s pretty impressive, especially when you consider that Albert had almost no experience with artificial intelligence or other major aspects of the program before he started working on it. By doing all of that within 15 seconds, turn after turn, it can beat all but the very best human players. Most recently, Future Sight AI, created by computer scientist Albert III, successfully made it into the top 5 percent of the competitive ladder.Īlbert posted a video explaining how it all works, but to summarize, the bot takes in all the information it can about the current state of the game, extrapolates the possibilities for all the turns it could take, looks a couple of turns ahead to how these would play out, and then chooses the option that can lead to the highest number of best outcomes. But that hasn’t stopped some people from trying. Thanks to the variety of monsters, stats, moves, and items, a Pokémon battle has hundreds of thousands of factors for any player - or machine - to consider. But creating an AI that could play Pokémon at the competitive level has been a more elusive problem. An AI can become the StarCraft esports champion.