RTS Gaming
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Israeli Military Trains Armored Vehicle AI with StarCraft II Games

As cute as it may sound, the Carmel is not something to be taken lightly. It’s a newly developed armored vehicle for the Israeli Defense Force. And it’s played a lot of StarCraft II.

No, that isn’t a joke. This is a new prototype vehicle that utilizes a number of video game aspects for development, including an Xbox controller and an AI that played games like Doom and Starcraft.

These decisions come from feedback by military drivers, who expressed a preference for a handheld controller comparable to the Xbox instead of a traditional flight stick.

But this is an RTS site, so let’s focus on the StarCraft part from earlier. According to Moshe Beutel, 44, who leads the algorithm group, the vehicle uses an artificial intelligence trained by playing countless hours of the popular RTS game StarCraft II. They praised the game for it’s dynamic real-time challenges. This helped the onboard system establish strategies regarding navigation, target detection, weapon selection, and more.

Beutel claimed that in only two weeks, the AI program was able to perform 20 to 30 percent better than humans as determining how to get from one point to another while enemies were present. Better, in this sense, means without any injuries.

This is almost the exact opposite of when old people would say that video games cause violence. This time, video games were a direct influence toward avoiding violence.