Facebook, Intel come out on top at AI-only Doom deathmatch battle royale

This week the folks behind Doom-based AI research platform VizDoom released results (and video samples) of a competition to see who can build the best Doom-playing AI -- and the winners were fielded by teams at Facebook and Intel.

As Engadget points out, this competition is especially interesting because these AI play Doom in a way that replicates how an actual human would -- by "looking" at the screen (actually, the screen buffer), indentifying and assessing what's happening, making decisions and then sending inputs to the game as though the AI were using a mouse and keyboard. 

The competition had two "tracks" to compete on: the first required AI competitors to compete in 12 10-minute deathmatch on a level the teams had already seen, with health and armor pickups available and rocket launchers the only weapon.

The second  "track" required competitors to field their bots in deathmatches played across three different maps (four 10-minute matches on each), none of which they'd seen before, with Doom's full array of weapons and items available for pickup.

A team of programmers from Facebook fielded the "F1" bot that won the first track, while a team from Intel Labs won the second track with their "IntelAct" bot. There are more fun details on exactly how the different bots competed (from overcoming problems with doorways to practicing a form of "spawn camping") in the full Engadget feature on VizDoom 2016.