Speedgate — an AI-made sport
By now, AI has been used for countless things — from manual labor, like picking berries, to being used in self-driving cars, facial recognition, the list could go on for ages.
But earlier last year, a team of designers at AKQA, a creative agency office in Oregon, came up with yet another application for artificial intelligence — coming up with a new sport for humans to play. The product of their work is known as “Speedgate”, a game that combines various aspects of other sports to create a single brand new sport.
To create this, however, the programmers had to spend months working with their AI, refining it bit by bit. They used a recurrent neural network, often referred to as an RNN, the same kind of AI that is commonly used in applications like speech recognition programs. To train the system, they fed the RNN information on over four hundred games, ranging from well-known games like soccer to lesser-known games, like cornhole.
The RNN would output various suggestions in the form of basic concepts or phrases, which the developers would then feed back into the machine in the form of properly worded instructions. Whitney Jenkins, director of the company where Speedgate originated from, explains how “the AI might say: ‘Game where for to hand ball throw two players jump and kick. “You take the output and tell the computer: ‘Say it like this: A game where two players kick and push a ball.’ You give that back, and the computer starts thinking that way. Eventually, the AI starts making suggestions like: ‘A game where anyone can pass and kick.’”
By doing this, the machine gradually began to generate more comprehensible ideas, although they were still far from perfect. For example, Jenkins stated that one of the many suggestions the model made was “Two players hitting a ball back and forth, but they are balancing on a tightrope that’s being elevated into the air by two hot air balloons.” Weeks later, the designers were finally able to narrow down the plethora of suggestions that their RNN came up with to ten, which they played at a local park, and finally decided on one choice, and Speedgate was born.
Speedgate combines various elements of sports such as croquet, rugby, and soccer to create an entirely new sport, and its success is clear — the sport has already spread overseas, to the point where its creators are already planning out a version that can even be played by disabled athletes. Speedgate is truly something new — a product of what humans and artificial intelligence can do together, and its success only bodes well for the future.
Garrick Kung is a Student Ambassador in the Inspirit AI Student Ambassadors Program. Inspirit AI is a pre-collegiate enrichment program that exposes curious high school students globally to AI through live online classes. Learn more at https://www.inspiritai.com/.
