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

An explanation of how a custom AI uses state-space search and predictive modeling to play competitive Pokemon.

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 battlepredictor.com/FSAI OR battle it throughout this week yourself at play.pokemonshowdown.com and look for user “Future Sight AI” __ References and Links: [01]: Possible Situations (a.k.a. State-Space Complexity) for different games - Tic Tac Toe, Othello, Go: project.dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/games/files/phd/Searchin… - Checkers: 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: informatik.uni-trier.de/~fernau/DSL0607/Masterthesis-Viergew… - Pokemon: Calculated myself based on how many possible team combinations there are. The code and more detail is here: github.com/aed3/FSAI-Extras/tree/main/totalBattleSituations [02]: Images - Type symbols sourced from bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/ and animated 3D models from 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: pokemonbattlepredictor.com/download-chrome - Firefox: pokemonbattlepredictor.com/download-firefox [05]: How Chess Playing AIs work - chess.com/article/view/how-does-alphazero-play-chess [06]: Pokemon Showdown GitHub Repo - 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: battlepredictor.com/FSAI/how-fsai-works#h.6of6yqzb7464 [08]: “Someone has Weather Ball” - “WBE Finals! Wolfey VS Cybertron” by WolfeyVGC: youtu.be/p4HpLenFjVk?t=1138 - I kinda feel bad for taking that part out, so you can read what I would’ve said here: 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… __ 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 __ 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