SEED's technical director Magnus Nordin has been interested in self-learning gaming AI ever since DeepMind taught itself to play old Atari games back in 2015. Once he got to SEED, he and his team figured out the basics of a three-dimentional FPS to train a neural network, then worked with the Battlefield team (DICE) to integrate the AI agent into the official game's environment.

Nordin noted that AI agents can hold their own against humans when they're pitted against live players in a simple game mode that's been restricted to handguns. The next step, says Nordin, will be training the network to deal with more complex strategies "like teamwork, knowing the map and being familiar with individual classes and equipment." While the agents still get confused or stuck in behavior loops, EA sees promise here for the future of neural networks and machine learning in games.

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