Question: Will AI defeat human in the 2017 Angry Birds challenge?
[Angry Birds](https://www.angrybirds.com/games/) is a game requiring prediction of the physics-based effects of different-property flying-impaired projectiles on various porcine-sourced structures.  This includes aiming the birds, using their varied properties, and using explosions and other effects.

Video games comprise an interesting arena for the training and testing of AI and machine learning (ML) systems.  Game-playing AI systems have been steadily advancing both in highly ruled-based (but difficult!) games like Chess and Go, and [videogames in which the AI system is just given the same input and output stream as a human player and must analyze the video](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v518/n7540/abs/nature14236.html).

For several years, an [Angry Birds AI competition](https://aibirds.org) has been held to evaluate and encourage game-playing ML systems to play Angry Birds.  In this competition the entrants are provided "a basic game playing software that includes a computer vision module, a trajectory planning module, and the game interface that works with the Chrome version of Angry Birds."
 
Part of the competition is an [Man vs Machine Challenge](https://aibirds.org/man-vs-machine-challenge/results.html), pitting the best ML systems against highly skilled humans. 

 In the 2016 competition, the human and AI players competed on four levels over the course of 10 minutes.  Although some AIs completed four levels, none completed all four (some humans did, albeit with difficulty.)  The best human players ended with approximately double the best AI scores.  This is actually a bit *less* good than a followup to the [2015 challenge](https://aibirds.org/man-vs-machine-challenge/previous-results.html) in which an AI came within a factor of 2/3 of the best human scores.
Created: 2016-10-05
Resolved: 2017-09-22
Answer: no