By Matthew HutsonDec. 26, 2019 , 10:00 AM

VANCOUVER, CANADANo, the red player in the video above isnt having a seizure. And the blue player isnt drunk. Instead, youre watching what happens when one artificial intelligence (AI) gets the better of the other, simply by behaving in an unexpected way.

One way to make AI smarter is to have it learn from its environment. Cars of the future, for example, will be better at reading street signs and avoiding pedestrians as they gain more experience. But hackers can exploit these systems with adversarial attacks: By subtly and precisely modifying an image, say, you can fool an AI into misidentifying it. A stop sign with a few stickers on it might be seen as a speed limit sign, for example. The new study reveals AI can be fooled into not only seeing something it shouldnt, but also into behaving in a way it shouldnt.

The study takes place in the world of simulated sports: soccer, sumo wrestling, and a game where a person stops a runner from crossing a line. Typically, both competitors train by playing against each other. Here, the red bot trains against an already expert blue bot. But instead of letting the blue bot continue to learn, the red bot hacks the system, falling down and not playing the game as it should. As a result, the blue bot begins to playterribly, wobbling to and fro like a drunk pirate, and losing up to twice as many games as it should, according to research presented here this month at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.

Imagine that drivers tend to handle their car a certain way just before changing lanes. If an autonomous vehicle (AV) were to use reinforcement learning, it might depend on this regularity and swerve in response not to the lane changing, but to the handling correlated with lane changing. An adversarial AV might then learn that the victim AV responds in this way, and use that against it. So, all it has to do is handle itself in that subtle, particular way associated with lane changing, and the victim AV will swerve out of the way.

Stock-trading algorithms that use reinforcement learning might also come to depend on exploitable cues.

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Watch this AI goalie psych out its opponent in the most hilarious way - Science Magazine