Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
NCSOFT dives deep into AI technology
An artificial intelligence player is introduced during the Intel Blade & Soul Tournament 2018 World Championship e-sports event at the SK Olympic Handball Stadium in southern Seoul, Sept. 15. / Courtesy of NCSOFT
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
One of Korea's leading game companies is diving deep into artificial intelligence (AI), after deciding the emerging technology is the firm's new growth engine.
NCSOFT, best known for its role playing game series Lineage, has developed AI source technology in various sectors including games since 2011 through its AI Center and Natural Language Processing (NLP) Center.
The company said its technologies can be applied in five different areas _ games, speech, images and video, language and knowledge.
Regarding utilizing AI in the game sector, NCSOFT recently displayed its superior technology.
At the Intel Blade & Soul Tournament 2018 World Championship e-sports event held at the SK Olympic Handball Stadium in southern Seoul, Sept. 15, the company's AI program had neck and neck battles against human players.
Developed by NCSOFT, Blade & Soul is a massively multiplayer online role-playing fantasy game based on Asian martial arts. NCSOFT has been operating e-sports competitions for the game with players fighting each other using their in-game characters.
One of its AI players, programmed to be specialized in defensive skills, lost to Nicholas Parkinson of the U.K. 2-1 and Haoran Shen of China 2-0. However another AI player, which has strength in offensive skills, defeated Korean player Choi Sung-jin 2-0.
NCSOFT said these AI players could produce surprising results as the company has developed its own Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) technology over the past three years and six months.
NCSOFT said the DRL technology is more integrated than that of Google's AlphaGo AI program that plays the board game go.
“Go is a turn-based game where players take turns when playing so an AI program can secure enough time to perform calculations,” NCSOFT said. “However, the man-to-man fight in Blade & Soul takes place in real time so the program is required to decide its movements within 0.1 seconds.”
NCSOFT said it plans to expand its AI technology to different kinds of fields. It said it will keep fostering more talented individuals in the sector and invest more to create value.