Ubisoft May Have Found the Answer to Video Game Bugs

Ubisoft is pushing forward into the AI space with gusto. The company, which has dabbled in AI technology previously, has now announced that its game developers are working with AI to further help with their coding particulalry with the issue of bugs.

The makers of Assassin's Creed and Far Cry are using a trained AI tool called Commit Assistant to catch when programmers are about to mess up, making preemptive bug fixes before the error is even made.

This info comes from an interview between Ubisoft Montreal R&D head Yves Jacquier and Wired. Jacquier reveals that Ubisoft fed the AI Commit Assistant tool with a decade's worth of code, in the same way chess AI programs are fed data of millions of chess games.

Ubisoft has already experimented with its new smart assistant, Sam, which is an app players can download to keep track of their in-game progress on Ubisoft games through a voice interface. At this year's DICE Summit, Ubisoft's director of Insights and Trends Lidwine Sauer even suggested that blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, can also be used in gaming in the form of collectibles.

The Commit Assistant AI is seen as more of a work tool, one that Yves Jacquier believes can save around 70 percent of costs by fixing day-to-day development problems. However, Jacquier cautions that the AI tool isn't a magical fixer just yet.

"You need a tremendous amount of data, but also a tremendous amount of power to crunch the data and all the mathematical methods. That [allows] the AI to make the prediction with enough accuracy so that the developers trusts the recommendation," says Jacquier.

No word yet if the Commit Assistant AI tool has been used on recent games like Assassin's Creed Origins or Far Cry 5, but from how much power is required to run the tool, it sounds like developer's jobs aren't at risk to a super code fixer straight out of an episode of Black Mirror. Yet.