Amazon has created a video game called Alexa Arena in which you interact with virtual robots. It is designed to gather data to train robots on how to behave around humans, but there are doubts over how many people will actually play the game.
Amazon has industrial robots for its vast warehouses but also develops consumer devices such as the , which launched in 2021. The robots are trained using data from physical tests in which robots and people interact in various scenarios. But such tests take a long time to do in large enough numbers to be useful and can be expensive.
Alexa Arena is intended to stand in for real-world tests at much lower cost, say in the Amazon Alexa AI team and his colleagues in a research paper. They say the game, in which you interact with a virtual robot, or agent, to help it complete certain tasks, uses 鈥渆ngaging visual effects鈥� to make it enjoyable, as well as items such as a freeze ray and a time machine that you can use on objects.
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at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says Amazon鈥檚 approach to creating a simulation that is also enjoyable for the public to play is like 鈥渒illing two birds with one stone鈥�.
鈥淢aking it fun will get people to interact with it in a game-playing fashion, but, also, it鈥檚 generating realistic human behavioural data from it in which your agent, like your robot, is moving around and interacting,鈥� he says.
鈥淲hen we make robots that adapt and learn, it is very hard for them to physically experience every possible scenario that they may encounter in the future,鈥� he says, adding that games like this will help expand the scenarios that can be tested.
One potential hurdle is that people may not want to play the game. at the University of Essex, UK, says Alexa Arena is what researchers call a game with a purpose, rather than a game played for its own sake, so it may have limited appeal.
鈥淭his particular game won鈥檛 be fun for many people,鈥� he says. 鈥淧layers may decide it鈥檚 rubbish and never play again, but, while they鈥檙e discovering that fact, they鈥檙e still making judgements that are useful to Amazon. A thousand players playing 1000 times each is the same 鈥� from Amazon鈥檚 perspective 鈥� as a million players playing once each.鈥�
Even if no one signs up to play the game when it is launched, it could still be useful, says at the University of Leeds, UK. He points out that Amazon could use its own crowdsourcing service, where users are paid small amounts to carry out tasks for other users, to hire people to play the game to generate data, which would still be cheaper than running physical tests.
Amazon didn鈥檛 respond to a request for comment.
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