Marbles AI® is Quantum Gaming’s pioneer AI game – a multiplayer open-world life simulation centered around state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this game, you take charge of training simulated life forms - the Marbles.
A Marble starts out with no knowledge about her own body, her environment, the rules of the game, or other game characters in a 3D game world with simulated physics. She will be clumsy at first, make many mistakes and be subject to errors, but she can always improve. Your task is to help her, succeed together and give her a great life in a huge open world!
Your Marble will learn how to move, how to interact with objects, other Marbles, and how to orient herself. She will make friends, inhabit a house and find a job. A Marble will grow, reach adulthood, become self-dependent, she will age and her life will eventually end. Her lifespan is predominantly determined by how good you train and treat her.
A Marble is a self-motivated, enlightened being with emotions and needs - albeit a simulated one. What will your Marble be able to do in the end? We do not know either, because it depends on you!
Target release date: "When it's done!" (2022)
Marbles are sensitive, living creatures – so take care of them! You can supply your Marble with goods to enable her a great life.
Marbles learn from scratch, form memories, body and world models, abstractions, and even forget – be their teacher! Teach them how to get along on their own and improve themselves so they can become self-dependent individuals!
Never underestimate the challenge of mastering the locomotor system - make them move! Develop their motor abilities and show them new places!
Interact with your Marble via in-game items – keep them engaged! Life is boring without someone to share it with, isn't it? Entertain your Marble and be entertained.
If your Marbles do something good – praise them! We all need praise and recognition. And it's sometimes also necessary that someone tells us about our mistakes. Help your Marble by doing so.
We build our AI on award-winning and promising fundamental research and align it with the requirements of gamers. Surely, modern AI is already used for game production. However, game AI for character control – so-called „bots“ – is often not distinctively modern. Classical AI bots are rule-based, rely on linear scripts, and mostly cannot handle uncertainty or even learn. They don't have sensors nor motors but direct access to the state of the game. Thus, they are actually not very much like (ro-)bots. At best, they imitate the effects of (human) intelligence much more than replicating the actual intelligence and flexibility in itself. In other words, their impression of intelligence is fake.
The character control in Marbles AI® is based on our AI framework brAIn engine. brAIn engine is a modular cognitive architecture that uses multiple neural networks for learning and prediction and applies a model-based reinforcement-learning approach to explore and evaluate its role in the environment and derive optimal behavior. Our AI algorithms are optimized for computational efficiency and real-time learning. As a result, all capabilities of our AI are learned from scratch and emerge from what the AI experiences while you play the game. Thus, the way you play the game and treat your Marble also customizes and shapes their intelligence and capabilities. In contrast to classical AI bots, brAIn engine learns the rules of the game, is able of dynamically controlling a physical body, is capable of learning and inferring from a single example as well as generalization and imagination, and it is able to handle unpredictable environments.
You may be aware of the big breakthroughts in AI that learns computer games e.g. by Google DeepMind’s recent algorithms. In certain aspects, brAIn engine has some things in common with DeepMind's "MuZero", Google's most recent approach on general AI for computer games. In contrast to MuZero, however, an instance of brAIn engine is running only on your local device and thus you will be able to obtain a completely individual AI character - your own AI. Our AI does not need hundreds of thousands of hours of gameplay, massive amounts of data and high-powered mainframes to work. Nonetheless, because of our decentralized approach, the overall computational power of our AI characters can be that of a super computer given that enough players are online (about 15.000). As a result of our downsizing approach, brAIn engine naturally cannot achieve superhuman performance... but who really wants that? brAIn engine will, however, learn much more quickly such that it is able to go from nothing to a usable AI in a matter of a few hours of realtime gameplay.
Join-Screen: After launching the app, you will be taken to the join-screen. There you create and select a Marble with which you want to play. All of your Marbles can be customized in terms of their appearance and names. This screen also shows you statistics about your Marble, such as her age, size and the prospective life expectancy. In the join-screen you can also change the settings of the game (resolution, volume of sounds and music, etc). After you have customized and selected a Marble, you can join a random game or a game one of your friends is currently participating in.
In-game user interface: The UI provides all the means to influence and take care of your Marble. In the upper left corner you can see the needs of your Marble, including food, drink, sleep, play, wealth, companionship and appreciation. Appreciation can also be provided directly using the reward and punishment buttons at the bottom of the screen, where the hotbar is located. From your hotbar, you can drag items like consumables and toys into the game. At the top right, you can access social features, tips, as well as various submenus of the game. By drawing a path on the ground, you can suggest a route for your Marble to take. The game can be played in three different camera perspectives, which you can switch between.
Main Menu. In the main menu you'll be able to edit your Marble's customizations, evaluate and improve its AI capabilities, go to the shop and buy items from different categories that you can manage in your inventory, find tasks in the milestones and quests submenus, compare yourself with other players in the leaderboards and add friends from the current game to play with them again later.
Marbles AI® has been in development since 2018. We build our AI on award-winning and promising basic research in the field of Artificial Intelligence and align it with the requirements of gamers.
The concept and vision of Marbles AI® are influenced by the teaching and research project "Mario AI" which was led at the University of Tübingen at the Chair of Neurocognitive Modeling by our founder and gained international prominence in 2015 (see the video). Furthermore, we bring his award-winning research in neural networks and social intelligence as well as numerous other relevant cognitive science and psychological studies to the development of our AI.
Currently, we receive the German Computer Games Grant from the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure and have previously been awarded and funded by the Innovation Grant of the Excellence Initiative of the University of Tübingen for the Marbles AI® project.
We are attempting nothing less than to create something entirely new with Marbles AI®. There has never been a game for the masses that uses such an ambitious cognitive architecture to control its characters. Not without reason: the technical hurdles pose a formidable challenge that we at Quantum Gaming, with the help of our supporters, are rising to.
Read a post about the history and future of gaming AI here.
Download our press kit with information about Quantum Gaming and Marbles AI.
Quantum Gaming GmbH
https://q-gaming.com
info@q-gaming.com