Researchers develop AI that can play Angry Birds

Rovio’s Angry Birds, a title that tasks players with slingshotting colorful fowl toward ill-intentioned, egg-stealing swine, has been characterized by one reviewer as “one of the most mainstream games out right now.” It’s spawned dozens of graphic novels and books (including cookbooks), two movies, and four animated series, not to mention countless spinoff games on mobile and other platforms. But it wasn’t until recently that Angry Birds inspired AI designed to beat the game’s top players — or at the very least, achieve performance at par.

In a preprint paper published this week on Arxiv.org, researchers at Charles University in Prague detail an AI system — DQ-Birds — trained using Deep Q-learning, a technique pioneered by Alphabet’s DeepMind that instructs an agent which action to take under what circumstances using a random sample of prior actions. In the Deep Q-learning flavor the researchers chose to implement, Double Q-learning, a policy distinct from the one used to select the next action is used to evaluate the first policy’s decision.