With artificial intelligence constantly in the news promising to disrupt the world as we know it, sometimes it’s nice to watch AI with goals much more benign than world domination — like mastering Rocket League.
Now you can watch as the next generation of AI-powered Rocket League bots apply what they’re learning live on Twitch. On stream are the latest and greatest AI bots that are trained in RLGym, a machine learning environment that enables Rocket League bots to learn to play via API at 800 times the normal game speed.
This breakneck training speed combined with carefully tuned reinforcement models make for bots that learn quickly and can perform at incredibly high levels. Ripple, one of a few bots that are showcased on stream, first trained by watching 10,000 hours of Supersonic Legend (Rocket League’s highest rank) gameplay to learn how humans move around the field.
Now, Ripple is playing copies of itself while applying a reinforcement algorithm — essentially learning which actions and inputs are optimal in any given situation. While Ripple currently misses quite a few open nets, its movement is impressively organic and new updates are frequently pushed to the bots as they learn in the background.
Viewers can also catch a glimpse of Ragnarok, a challenger to infamous bot Nexto that wreaked havoc on high-level Rocket League players for months. The channel claims that Ragnarok can learn five times faster than previous bots and may have the potential to challenge Supersonic Legend-level opponents. But players don’t have to worry — RLGym’s newest creations are only playable offline and won’t be released to the public per Psyonix’s request.
RLGym developer Aech is understandably upset by how his creation was hijacked by cheaters and told me via direct message “We really wish cheaters had not stepped in and abused our work like they did. Still, our community is thriving and we have lots of cool projects on the way!”
“Cool projects” is an understatement. Just as human players continuously raise the game’s skill ceiling, AI-powered Rocket League bots are also teaching themselves new mechanics. Given enough time, tweaks, and computing power, these bots have the potential to meet, or even surpass, the world’s top Rocket League players.
To learn more, check out the always-on Twitch stream and use the “!whatisthis” chat command, or visit RLGym.org.
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