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Games Entertainment

Game AI Conference Explored 28

Posted by Zonk from the thinking-machine-super-computers dept.
Academia Blog Grand Text Auto has up a long set of notes from last week's first AI and Interactive Entertainment conference, which includes keynote talks from Doug Church, Will Wright, Chris Crawford and Damian Isla of Halo 2. From the Doug Church talk: "none of the AI detail gets attention in a 30 second ad or magazine blurb...also, if a character in battle only lives a minute, there's not much fidelity players can even perceive...industry has been promising good characters for a long time, not delivered... players are cynical, don't want to hear it anymore...hard to back out of the fakery"
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Game AI Conference Explored More

Game AI Conference Explored

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  • The quote is kind of hard to understand. I RTFA and the point of that quote still eludes me.
    • I think it's pretty straight forward... AI still sucks and gamers are tired of being told otherwise. The big game developers don't care either since you're just gonna shoot the guy in the head as soon as you see him...
  • I wonder if the experiments in simulating the human brain will come in handy with making an AI. I mean if we can understand how the human mind makes decisions, we can better code an AI that can make decisions the way we can based on environment, situation... how we feel about the world... etc.
    • A link [slashdot.org] (slashdot.org) to the slashdot article about making a "virtual brain".

      I'm starting to feel very silly, because i'm the only one commenting on this story. 4 comments so far too.
    • I'm covering the overall architecture of the brain right now in my intro. psych. class.

      It looks remarkably like a computer architecture when broken into components. You have your I/O neurons, interfacing with a component that discards noise. From here it is put onto a bus, into what the textbook labels as the "executive" (CPU). The executive can store and load from short-term memory (registers)---there are different kinds for various senses and parts of cognition---and do other brain-type things. It can al
      • Actually, if you think about, it may be closer to being a quantum computer than anything else. There aren't 1s and 0s in our brains, but multitudes of different states for each neuron, as there are multitudes of different spin states for each particle in a quantum computer.
        • This doesn't make too much sense. The fact that a neuron is more complicated than a bit and can take up component states means nothing. Component states can simply be thought of as single states (something in states A and B is in state A-B), and multiple bits could map to one neuron. There's nothing that says a computer needs to work on bits. A quantum computer is a different beast all together :)
      • It looks a whole lot like a computer because that's the dominant metaphor that we're using and we're filtering our explanations through that idea.

        At the time of Descartes, they thought that everything looked kind of like it was clockwork and so they made explanation using that metaphor. Freud did a pretty good job of explaining the psyche in terms of conflicting forces and Jung did it by populating our heads with stereotypes.

        Metaphors are cool that way - they are flexible and once you get a halfway good m
    • An AI that reacted like a human brain in a Half-Life game would wet it's pants. You want an AI that will panic under fire?

    • Re:And now that think about it... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @07:50AM (#12745243) Homepage
      I wonder if the experiments in simulating the human brain will come in handy with making an AI.

      AI for a computer game? Hardly.

      One of the most effective, fun game AIs I've played against recently is that in Halo - it's probably no more advanced than that in some other games, but it has some great application of smoke-and-mirrors and does a good job of presenting obvious cause-and-effect behaviours to the player.

      Kill a Covenant Elite, and all the lowly grunts nearby will panic and try to run and hide. But to actually shoot that Elite, it's probably taking cover behind a rock, waiting for you to attack - it doesn't just meander into combat, shooting blindly.

      All sorts of things like this - simple 'IF foo THEN bar' behaviours which the player can learn, understand and anticipate can be great, so long as they're fun to play against. Some hyper-intelligent enemy that can figure out precisely where the player is and attack unseen might be programmatically more advanced, but isn't necessarily more fun to play against.

      In-the-field tactics are probably best left to the game AI, but higher-level, map-specific scripted strategies can give the illusion of some overall plan behind the enemies' actions (plus they can be designed to be fun to fight against, rather than being whatever the AI might extrude - fun, crap or otherwise).

      Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...
      • ### Neural networks or whatever might be more 'realistic', but they won't necessarily be better to play against...

        ACK, I see the biggest use of neural networks and advanced AI not so much in enemy behaviour, but in interactive story telling. Today most games run on some basic AI combined with a bunch of prescripted events, so basically everything the player is going to see is already set right from the start. What I think will play a important role in the future aren't more clever enemies, but an a form of

  • Bugs (Score:1)

    by Punboy ( 737239 )
    Could they maybe focus on fixing their bugs [slashdot.org] (slashdot.org) before making a "kick-ass" AI?
  • They simply are thinking to small. Smarter enemies, smarter units in RTS games, smarter comrades in team-based games.. Sure - all these things are the realm of AI.. But they are simply thinking too small!

    One area of AI-usage that I have not seen explored yet is crafting an AI that would respond to the players actions and modify the flow of the game. In example: suppose I was developing [yet another] fantasy-based MMORPG. Perhaps this one involves 3 kingdoms caught in a never ending struggle (remind you of
    • Thats just huge set of IF, THEN commands based on the original quest. IF you are spotted, THEN (A)ssassinate quest on the (E)nemy side and the (P)rotect scout quest on the (F)riendly side is unlocked. That would be a series of triggers. Almost all games already use such systems. (IF player crosses X mark, THEN Y enemies come out of Z area.)

      Throw in the whole 'well what if there were no other players to escort the original scout player to the city?' issue or the ever-present 'what about balancing the two sid

      • Re:Except thats not AI (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Tuesday June 07, 2005 @05:14AM (#12744753)
        if the NPCs gave chase to you DEPENDING on where, when, how and who/which NPC saw you.

        Functionality most likely implemented through a huge set of IF-THEN statements.

        That's to some degree all that AI is, whether it's an expert system or an Eliza-style conversational program. You really don't get away from if-then until you start talking about computational intelligence, like neural networks, Dijkstra-style pathfinding, and the like.

    • I already thought of this and begain some work on it for a persistant world with the Neverwinter Nights toolset. It's limitations hinders a lot of the more advanced ideas I wanted (interwoven custom-tailored quests), but with osme of the clever things I've seen done with that toolset I'm sure something similar to what I'm thinking is possible.

  • I'm nor convinced, people even want a strong AI.
    I for one like shooting hordes of relatively stupid enemies. I love Resident Evil 4 (finished it yesterday), but the enemies are not exactly clever (and no, that's not because they're zombies. They're not).
    The challenge comes mostly from their number and some clever locations they're sitting or waiting.

    IMHO, a clever combination of scripts and behaviour patterns should be enough to provide a reasonable challenge.
    If people want good (A)I, they can play o
  • Quoted from the article: "now games becoming are content-led, not technology-led".

    Although there are a few bright gems in the future that this may be true about, I feel that this statement is for the most part false.

    Just look at the PS3 and Xbox 360. Sony and Microsoft have gotten into a dick measuring contest about who can have the best specs. Nintendo is promising a revolution, but I'm guessing it will be more of the same old. Next generation games will be a lot like today's games, only prettier.

  • Fun, one month ago a friend presented his thesis to the jury.

    Thesis is a learning system for game NPCs. He used Team Fortress Capture the flag, one specific map, and trained his 4 bots against FoxBot and another bot which name i don't remember.

    After some training, he gathered 4 human players, and made them play against the 3 bot teams (not saying which was which bot, of course !). Results? Human players found his bots were the most realistic and surprising to play with (not the hardest).

    Hopefully
  • The NYTimes wrote an enthusiastic article [nytimes.com] about the conference.
  • AGHHHH!!!! [charging directly toward you blasting away mindlessly]

    -Eric

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