Games and technology are inseparable

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be one of the technologies that have had a profound impact on human society in the past twenty to thirty years. Many industry experts believe that as a branch of computer science, artificial intelligence has strong scientific exploration attributes

Artificial intelligence (AI) may be one of the technologies that have had a profound impact on human society in the past twenty to thirty years. Many industry experts believe that as a branch of computer science, artificial intelligence has strong scientific exploration attributes. Based on the algorithm, the "common divisor", games and technology have become two important driving forces to promote the development of artificial intelligence, forming a "double helix" for scientific exploration.

Looking back at the milestone events since the birth of artificial intelligence, we will find that what experts have said is true. From the AI's "Deep Blue" victory over world chess champion Kasparov in 1997, to AlphaGo's victory over world Go champion Li Shishi in the Go human-machine battle in 2016, and to the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, the two major keywords of gaming and technology have never been absent.

Many people may not know that the world's first electronic game was invented by a nuclear physicist named William Higginbotham. During World War II, Higginbotham participated in the famous Manhattan Project, which was the US Army's plan to develop an atomic bomb.

In 1958, Higginbothm served as the head of the Instrumentation Department at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States, dedicated to researching the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The laboratory has a 3-day public open day event every year. The previous open days used static displays with limited effectiveness. To stimulate public interest in nuclear physics, Higginbothm came up with games. He used a ballistic missile trajectory calculation system to create an electronic game called "Double Tennis". Players can use the buttons on the controller to manipulate small dots on the screen and bounce back and forth on a simulated tennis court. This game was a great success, attracting hundreds of people to queue up and experience on Open Day.

If electronic games were born in order to interact with the public through science, then the following story becomes a "dual protagonist" of science and games in a large-scale drama scene.

In May 2008, a protein folding game called Foldit was officially launched for public testing. In less than two years, this alternative game project successfully attracted over 240000 registered players.

The idea behind this game comes from biologist David Baker at the University of Washington.

Professor Baker specializes in molecular biology, and his specific research direction is protein structure. Proteins are composed of amino acids, but there are countless possibilities for the specific structure and folding mode of amino acid composition, and researchers need to find the correct folding mode from these countless possibilities. This workload is really too large, it's not something that a research team can accomplish with overtime. So Professor Baker sought help from an associate professor of computer science at the same school. With the help of the latter team, the protein folding game Foldit was born.

Facts have proven that experts are among the people. The protein folding results of players far exceeded the expectations of molecular biologists. In 2011, Foldit players helped decipher the folding structure of a AIDS retroviral protease, which is a scientific problem that experts have been studying for 15 years. Even more miraculously, this Foldit player only took 10 days.

The same scene also occurred in the field of astronomy. The observation data generated by astronomical telescopes every day is extremely astonishing, and early image recognition techniques were not precise enough, and many contents needed to be recognized with the naked eye. To this end, Chris Lintot, a professor of astrophysics at Oxford University, created a website named Galaxy Zoo to attract the public to help astronomers identify distant galaxies in a game like way. As a result, the players were unstoppable and successfully cleared a series of important scientific "dungeons".

Later, GalaxyZoo further developed into Zooniverse, becoming the world's largest scientific game crowdsourcing platform that spans multiple disciplines. Players can "calculate" the number of Weddell seals in a certain area of Antarctica, search for small lizards on cliffs, determine the location of mitochondria in cells, and contribute to the scientific cause while playing games.

Artificial intelligence is essentially a "romantic encounter" between science and gaming. This is because artificial intelligence requires simulating human thinking for technological innovation, and games are precisely a relatively low-cost and less difficult to promote experimental scenario. In the field of gaming, in order to pursue clearer visualization effects, smoother interactive experiences, faster running speed, and more vivid game characters, people constantly put forward new requirements for artificial intelligence from the theoretical, technical, and even ethical levels. This is also the biggest driving force for the continuous development of artificial intelligence.

As early as 1950, Turing, known as the "father of artificial intelligence", mentioned the relationship between artificial intelligence research and games in a paper titled "Computers and Intelligence", believing that board games are an important field to showcase the "thinking" ability of machines. In this paper, Turing proposed the most famous testing program in the field - Turing testing. In a sense, the Turing test is a scientific experimental script presented in the form of a game, whose core content is how to make artificial intelligence successfully "deceive" human examiners, causing them to mistakenly believe that the artificial intelligence behind the test scenario is human.

At present, it is widely believed in the industry that the next artificial intelligence milestone event may be born in complex strategy games. In the future, when artificial intelligence learns to perceive, understand, reason, make decisions, act, and interact in real-time like humans, it will inevitably play a greater role in complex and ever-changing real environments.

It is interesting that games have long transcended the traditional entertainment field and begun to extend their tentacles to all aspects of economic and social development. For example, in 2020, the "Advancing Prescription" game developed by AkiliInteractive received prescription drug approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), becoming a digital new drug officially used for the clinical treatment of attention deficit and cognitive impairment in children. In 2022, Tencent AILab and the "King of Glory" game team jointly developed the artificial intelligence open research platform - Kaiwu, becoming one of the few open algorithm platforms in China to study multi-agent games. Games are transcending boundaries and constantly incubating cutting-edge technologies that are more competitive and closer to real-world applications.

From today's perspective, the "entanglement" between games and technology is so deep that it is difficult to part with. This kind of "hardcore" romance may be the legendary "mutual achievement".

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