Players of China’s most popular game are training Tencent’s AI

Honor of Kings is pitting players against an AI program named after the Monkey King in the name of science

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An anime character with pink glasses and a shamrock in his teeth is one of the more interesting representations of AI we’ve seen. (Picture: Tencent AI Lab/Honor of Kings)

Masha Borak

Published: 5:00am, 6 May 2020Updated: 5:00am, 6 May 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

It’s been three years since Google’s AlphaGo marked a new era in artificial intelligence by beating champion Lee Sedol in Go, an ancient Chinese board game. Now AI is moving on to video games as players of China's most popular title recently found out.

Honor of Kings is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) mobile game inspired by League of Legends. The fantasy role playing game, known internationally as Arena of Valor, has 70 million daily active users. It also has an AI player called Wukong, known in Chinese as Jiewu, and gamers in China got a chance to test their abilities against it during the first four days of May.

Arena of Valor, China’s mobile League of Legends, is aiming to be the world’s go-to mobile esport

Developed by the Tencent AI Lab, Wukong is an AI program seeking to use games to improve its learning capabilities and make them more human-like.

MOBA games like Honor of Kings involve planning, strategy and complex decision making: Gamers need to coordinate with their team to capture the opposing team’s turrets and base. This is why Tencent, the world’s largest gaming company, believes that complex games can be a key step to achieving one of the ultimate AI goals: Artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is a term used to describe the hypothetical ability of a machine to mimic human intelligence by being able to learn and solve any problem a person can. And Tencent isn’t the only company trying to get there with games.