Skip to main content

Learning by playing: AI can dominate most human competitors in Freeciv

Beating the AI opponents in a strategy game is the first step any gamer takes before heading online where the real challenge is. Whether they cheat or not, most game AIs are beatable, often with simple, repeatable strategies once you find their weak points. Not so with Arago’s flagship AI. Named HIRO (Human Intelligence Robotically Optimized), the algorithm can beat almost all players — and that’s not even its main job.

Arago is an IT automation firm, which develops smart AIs that can streamline businesses and automate many of their functions. HIRO is one such AI, and while it does an excellent job of improving workflows at a number of corporations, it’s the way it’s trained that is most fascinating. It plays — very well at that — the freely available civilization-building game called Freeciv.

Recommended Videos

Much like Sid Meier’s series, Freeciv is a game about deep strategical choice over many turns and many hours. Typical AI in games like this are easily outstripped by human players, but not so with Arago’s HIRO, which has beaten 80 percent of the humans it’s gone up against and is still getting smarter (thanks TechCrunch).

Getting better at anything requires training, whether you’re a human or AI like HIRO. To that end, Arago made it possible for HIRO to understand words like “city,” and “tile” in order to teach it in a more humanlike manner. It’s the restructuring and recombining of the lessons it’s been taught over time that make HIRO so versatile and ultimately capable of beating almost any opponent that’s thrown at it.

HIRO Learns to Play Freeciv

Arago is rather proud of this achievement, pointing out that Freeciv is a highly complicated game, with many more permutations of moves than the Go game that Google’s AI recently bested a world champion in.

Those same abilities are transferred over to the more business-centric tasks HIRO handles in its day job.

Developments like these are why OpenAI recently announced an outsourcing of its AI development platforms through its new Universe initiative. Training AI to play games like we do may be one of the best ways to teach them to be versatile.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
Perplexity’s new AI agent can perform multi-step tasks on your Android device
Running Perplexity on OnePlus Pad 2.

Perplexity announced Thursday that it is beginning to roll out an agentic AI for Android devices, called Perplexity Assistant, which will be able to independently take multi-step actions on behalf of its user.

"We are excited to launch the Perplexity Assistant to all Android users," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote in a post to X on Thursday. "This marks the transition for Perplexity from an answer engine to a natively integrated assistant that can call other apps and perform basic tasks for you."

Read more
Everything you need to know about AI agents and what they can do
a hollow man under light

The agentic era of artificial intelligence has arrived. AI agents are capable of operating independently and without continuous, direct oversight, while collaborating with users to automate monotonous tasks. Based on the same large language models that drive popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, agentic AIs differ in that they use LLMs to take action on a user's behalf rather than generate content.

In this guide, you'll find everything you need to know about how AI agents are designed, what they can do, what they're capable of, and whether they can be trusted to act on your behalf.
What is an agentic AI?
Billed as "the next big thing in AI research," agentic AI is a type of generative AI model that can act autonomously, make decisions, and take actions towards complex goals without direct human intervention. These systems are able to interpret changing conditions in real-time and react accordingly, rather than rotely following predefined rules or instructions.

Read more
OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode can now see your screen and analyze videos
Advanced Santa voice mode

OpenAI's "12 Days of OpenAI" continued apace on Wednesday with the development team announcing a new seasonal voice for ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode (AVM), as well as new video and screen-sharing capabilities for the conversational AI feature.

Santa Mode, as OpenAI is calling it, is a seasonal feature for AVM, and offers St. Nick's dulcet tones as a preset voice option. It is being released to Plus and Pro subscribers through the website and mobile and desktop apps starting today and will remain so until early January. To access the limited-time feature, first sign in to your Plus or Pro account, then click on the snowflake icon next to the text prompt window.

Read more