THE FUTURE IS HERE

How an A.I. is Becoming the World's Best Pokemon Player

Because sometimes you gotta spend a year turning a childhood interest into a personal computer science breakthrough…

Learn more about the AI or watch it battle live at http://www.battlepredictor.com/FSAI
OR battle it throughout this week yourself at https://play.pokemonshowdown.com and look for user “Future Sight AI”
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References and Links:
[01]: Possible Situations (a.k.a. State-Space Complexity) for different games
– Tic Tac Toe, Othello, Go: https://project.dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/games/files/phd/SearchingForSolutions.pdf
– Checkers: https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~duane/publications/pdf/1991hpai.pdf
– Chess: The two links above both solve for Chess, but provide conflicting numbers, so took the average of both
– Connect 4: http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~fernau/DSL0607/Masterthesis-Viergewinnt.pdf
– Pokemon: Calculated myself based on how many possible team combinations there are. The code and more detail is here: https://github.com/aed3/FSAI-Extras/tree/main/totalBattleSituations
[02]: Images
– Type symbols sourced from https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/ and animated 3D models from https://www.pkparaiso.com/espada_escudo/sprites_pokemon.php
– All originally from Pokemon Sword and Shield
[03]: Chance to win for an NBA team from ESPN
[04]: Pokemon Battle Predictor Links
– Chrome and Edge: https://www.pokemonbattlepredictor.com/download-chrome
– Firefox: https://www.pokemonbattlepredictor.com/download-firefox
[05]: How Chess Playing AIs work – https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-does-alphazero-play-chess
[06]: Pokemon Showdown GitHub Repo – https://github.com/smogon/Pokemon-Showdown
[07]: Random Moves
– I ran tests where during the AI’s runs, it would choose a random game to only click random moves. This happened 60 times and it won… 0 games.
– That’s actually worse than it should be, and I go over it in more detail here: http://www.battlepredictor.com/FSAI/how-fsai-works#h.6of6yqzb7464
[08]: “Someone has Weather Ball”
– “WBE Finals! Wolfey VS Cybertron” by WolfeyVGC: https://youtu.be/p4HpLenFjVk?t=1138
– I kinda feel bad for taking that part out, so you can read what I would’ve said here: http://www.battlepredictor.com/FSAI/how-fsai-works
– This is also where the short gameplay clip in the intro comes from. One of many, many Easter Eggs…
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Timestamps
0:00 – Pokemon: More than Meets the Eye
1:14 – Intro
1:39 – Competitive Pokemon’s Depth
2:51 – Answering Your Questions
4:05 – Applying Machine Learning to Pokemon
9:00 – Seeing a Battle’s Future
14:00 – How the AI Did
18:00 – Inverse Damage Calculation
20:31 – Future Topics
22:24 – Battle the AI!
23:15 – Potential Applications
23:36 – Kinda Arrogant, Kinda Accurate
24:19 – Potential Applications
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I started this channel for three reasons:
1. Increase representation in the engineering community
2. Improve at talking into a camera
3. Include tasks I’m fine with putting less effort towards in the day (this video being an exception)
Some of the goals are more far-fetched than others, but I’ll see what I can do.