Next Gen Beautiful But Brainless? 131
Next Generation has up a short piece discussing a Guardian Interview with AI developer Steve Grand. Grand opines that next-gen graphics are deepening the uncanny valley. More than just plastic looks and inhuman faces, the weakness of game AI is increasingly becoming glaring compared to the graphical prowess in games. "AI isn't so much unappreciated as nonexistent. Most of what counts as AI in the games industry is actually a bunch of 'if/then' statements. If a computer character doesn't learn something for itself then the programmer must have told it what to do, and anything that does exactly what it's told and nothing else is not intelligent. This is changing, and neural networks and other learning systems are beginning to creep in. But games programmers tend to devalue the phrase 'artificial intelligence."
The market will decide (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The market will decide (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing's stupider than some pithy comment about "the market." The market is people, and people can be irrational about a lot of things. The invisible hand deserves a rap on the knuckles from time to time.
Re:The market will decide (Score:5, Funny)
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That's awesome. Reminds me of a "Deep Thought" that Jack Handey might have written. Funny stuff.
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If so people will vote with their dollars still. If NO developer meets what people want, then ALL developers will suffer, just look at the Video game crash in the 80s. Everyone (for the most part) produced crap, and the people responded by saying screw you guys.
Of
AI - non-existent (Score:3, Insightful)
Layne
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You wouldn't happen to work for a government oversight agency, would you?
Re:AI - non-existent (Score:5, Insightful)
Another reason AI isn't advancing is because modern games in addition to concentrating on graphics also concentrate heavily on multiplayer and online aspects. Sure the "AI" in an FPS or RTS might not be all that great but how good does it need to be? most people will just breeze through the solo missions in a few short hours and then spend the next 6 months to a year playing online where AI doesn't even factor into it. Once again, some solid multiplayer features are much more valuable use of development time then computer AI.
Honestly I see us moving to a point of being less depend on AI before AI actually gets better... it's just not a cost effective use of development.
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It's a bit off topic here, but I think the key with online gaming is to merge these two where possible. I think that's one of the things that made Halo 2 so popular on Xbox Live - you could play WITH your friends as a team, and take that team against a team of strangers. And not just random people, but people of approximately the same skill level.
It's an incredibly fun way of do
Re:AI - non-existent (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine for a moment, you have a single player FPS. Now, take that FPS and add to it an outstanding AI. Then add in cooperative play for up to 8 players. Now, you have a game that you and your friends can play cooperatively, a computer that learns your tactics, and can develop new tactics on the fly. This to me seems so much more entertaining than fragging the same guys over and over again in a deathmatch. I'm pretty sure I'd buy it.
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You seem to be conflating "online" with "PvP".
I believe that there's an enormous untapped market of people interested in social and cooperative gaming.
I've got 3 consoles
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With the already ridiculously high cost of development to bring graphics up to modern day standards for "bleeding edge" it's not like they have much time to develop a good system for something they can't show you a screenshot of. Spending the time to develop a real AI as you described doesn't really add much value to the game in terms of marketing.
You seem to think that the kind of AI that is needed would have every enemy in a FPS wondering as much about what they are going to have for dinner as how to best kill you.
The kind of AI that is needed for games is going to very specialised and tailored to the game. It doesn't need to pass the Turing test to be better than the dumb systems out there.
I think one of the main reasons that AI isn't that heavily worked on is that is might change how a game needs to be played. A 'smart' enemy in a FPS, on lo
Game AI is hard, but not nebulous. (Score:5, Informative)
In the context of this discussion, "AI" means broadening the use of those algorithms (they are already necessary in some situations anyway) and in general producing game AI that's more capable - better able to deal with obstacles in the environment, predict player strategies and determine which of its strategies are most effective against the player. The goal being to create automated opponents which don't need to rely on unfair advantages (such as superior car performance in a racing game) to compete against human players.
In the context of, say, a mech combat game (as an example, racing games are a bit more of a static problem, and flight sims wouldn't require so much obstacle navigation), a capable AI would likely need the following:
- A predefined set of tactics. These would be designed by the people who create the game. The important thing would be that the tactics are effective and that the game AI has sufficient information about when each tactic is useful. Supplying this kind of "playbook" information decreases the demands on the AI program significantly: they no longer need to be able to synthesize these tactics, they can merely choose the right one.
- A system for selecting tactics to use: a good design would include considerations like the state of the AI's mech, the weapon being used against it, and general parameters of the enemy machine. (For instance, a good AI operating a sniper machine should know not to close to close range with a player machine that specializes in close combat... Likewise, if the AI's machine is running out of power, it shouldn't attempt an "overboost" move - unless it is clear that such a move could work sufficiently to win the fight.)
- An adequate navigation system for moving around in the environment. This must be tied in to the tactics being used - so that attempts to dodge a missile, for instance, aren't foiled by collision with an obstacle.
- An adaptive factor - a process that attempts to determine how effective various tactics have been against a particular opponent, and why certain tactics may have failed - so that tactics that are likely to fail again are disregarded.
- A random factor - the AI's next move is randomly selected from among the best candidates.
See, that's not so nebulous, is it? Pretty well-defined, I'd say. It's just, as you say, hard. It's hard to create a system that's dynamic and complex, it's hard to make sure you've got it right when you have created it - and the problem with game development is that there's so many other places that effort could be directed which aren't as easily dispensable as good AI. Most game AIs nowadays have a moderately good playbook (it's one of the easiest elements to add - humans know how to play the game and so they can record sequences the computer can repeat - so it's easy to add a small playbook - though providing good static information about how to choose a tactic from a larger playbook is harder), and a random factor is easy to introduce. Selecting tactics is often reduced to a static problem, and navigation is either made static, or solved by making the AI able to get through the environment in other ways, if necessary. (For instance, an AI that is always shooting and frequently moving forward - but gets caught behind a building - if the building is destroyed when the AI shoots, then moving forward no longer gets the AI stuck.) But navigation often is not tied in to the tactics and adaptive factors usually aren't adequately implemented in a way that makes a real difference.
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To call A* and finite state machines artificial intelligence is, in my opinion, an extreme twisting of the term; these t
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To call A* and finite state machines artificial intelligence is, in my opinion, an extreme twisting of the term; these things only fall under that label because early researchers were still under the delusion that they could hand-code an enormous tree of if statements and if they gave it enough feature-bloat it would seem intelligent. In my opinion, the simple algorithms used in today's "AI" engines should more be labelled pre-AI, as in useful procedures that incoming data might be preprocessed through before it's sent to something that actually does something smart with it.
Yeah, I tend to agree. In my AI class at college we learned things like the "Customers who bought this also liked" algorithm, as well as the search tree stuff I mentioned. Like you, I don't think that stuff is a likely candidate for the problem of synthesizing an intelligent mind. But within the context of most games, AI just means the perception of intelligent strategy, within a very limited domain. It's easy to make an "AI" capable of piloting an Armored Core or driving on a small set of pre-defined
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Yup, that sounds about right. I was a math major in college, but I was very interested in AI, so I sat in for the first lecture (my school had a shopping period where you "sample" your classes before registering), and I ultimatel
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People used to think that. Over the last several decades, they came to realize that you simply cannot "write" AI programs, you have to learn them.
So, the "language of real AI" exists: it's learning algorithms.
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I think you misinterpret the strength of my claim - it's a lot stronger than just that classical AI is not going to happen. I don't think our languages are properly set up to write the learning algorithms, let alone AI, and I agree that to "write" AI programs is a futile mission. The fact is, to s
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Modern machine learning algorithms are largely about numerical algorithms and graphs. Many modern programming languages support numerical algorithms and graphs very well.
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Knowing about "A* and min/max searches" is about as useful in AI these days as knowing about relays is for writing Java e
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The term "Artificial Intelligence" also includes algorithms that solve problems that are merely difficult - things like combinatorial searches (A* and min/max searches, in particular) - and the general approach of attempting to model an AI character's actions based on their state and their goals, rather than going just for the desired effect of making them reasonably tough game opponents.
Knowing about "A* and min/max searches" is about as useful in AI these days as knowing about relays is for writing Java enterprise applications.
Depends on how broad your definition of "AI" is and what level of "Artificial Intelligence" you seek to create. For an "AI" chess opponent, jet fighter pilot, Bomberman player, etc. those search algorithms could be quite sufficient. I won't claim that this kind of "artificial intelligence" is likely to pass a Turing test - but in the context of games you don't really need that.
programmer education (Score:2)
Yes, but that's a problem with the education programmers receive, not with the world. There are good techniques for modeling those processes, you simply weren't taught them.
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Other excluded memes: Comic book guy (Simpson quotes in general?), Profit!, etc.
Layne
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good, now do something useful (Score:2)
agreed! (Score:2, Insightful)
OTOH, I do see why true AI doesnt make much of a play in games... how long does the average bad guy live in a FPS anyway? If they learned from one guy to the next it would be more like a 'hive mind' then indviduals learning. For RTS games it could make a little more sence, since the "commanders" wouldnt be amung those slaughtered on the battlefield on each level. MMO's present a whole bucket of issues beyond the life span one...
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A far, far weaker opponent can defeat an enemy if its clever enough.
The big problem with boss fights in MMOs is that they are one guy vs. a party, and pretty much rely on raw firepower, zerging, or number balancing to beat.
I've always been a fan of games like Zelda where defeating an enemy is not based on fire power (you don't generally get many "stat ups" in Zelda), or even that much on skill with a controller, but is instead based on figu
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A time and a place for AI (Score:1)
However there are lots of games out there that would definitely benefit from better AI. So lets not discount the entire field just because it doesn't apply to one genre.
AI has never been important (Score:4, Insightful)
If by being smart means 'better at a game' the AI is already a super genius. If by smart means 'flailing your hands around while pretending to do something before losing to a human player', then whatever that creates the best sense of illusion works the best. If it's a bunch of if/else statements, why not? There's no reason any fancy technique will get you a fancier loser.
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That's not really AI, though. If you're playing a computer opponent, then the AI behind that opponent is supposed to simulate the behavior of that opponent. The real behavior of that opponent is how it would act in real life. If I'm playing an FPS against AI-controlled people with machine guns, then the AI's job is to make the virtual characters behav
Re:AI has never been important (Score:4, Interesting)
Put it this way, have you ever had a conversation with a character in a PC RPG? Well, they don't have conversations do they? They just spit out a set of canned responses. Currently, part of AI research is the Turing Test [wikipedia.org] which is to create a machine that can fool a person having a conversation with it into believing that there is a real person there.
This isn't a win/lose scenario. The machine you are talking to may be an ally or a neutral character in a game. But it would make the game more interesting if the conversation you were having seemed realistic. [youtube.com]
There are other applications of AI as well. For example, they could add unpredictability to an enemy behaviour in a game. The enemy AI still wouldn't be the unbeatable uber player the machine would be, but you'd have to vary your tactics during a game to beat it. Yes, you are still "creating a loser," but a less predictable loser.
What's the point? Well, the point of playing the computer is to learn the nuances of the game. Obviously, there's no great sense of accomplishment in beating a computer. If computers follow a predictable pattern, you eventually plateau on the useful knowledge you can learn from them.
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The goal isn't "create better losers," it's "create characters whose actions are lifelike." In the problem domain you specify (FPS and beat-em-ups), this can mean (among many other things) having computer players with a limited "view" of the game space, the ability to learn, and the ability to initiate actions that aren't directly coupled to the human player's inputs. This isn't easy even in such a limited (read: boring) probl
Re:AI has never been important (Score:5, Informative)
That's absolutely true, but is in some ways dependent on the game. In a fighting game, you can always see what your opponent is doing, so if you had perfect reaction time you could counter every move. In this type of a game, a computer could theoretically play "perfectly" and never lose.
In an FPS, this is not necessarily the case. Bots that can aim perfectly are quite potent, to be sure, but sometimes being smart can be just as important to actually winning. For example, if the AI bot has a predictible pattern through the map (as most bots I've played against do), then when you know where the bot's pathing takes them you can have fired a rocket at where they are going to be so it smacks into their feet right as they round the corner. Unless the bot "cheats", and sees your rocket through the wall, it won't be able to avoid it nor will it be able to retaliate because you've moved around the next corner already to line up your next ambush shot. An actual AI that attempted to learn your patterns, and change its own pattterns when it realizes that you've discovered them, would be a truly deadly opponent.
This is where the difference between algorithmic precision and speed vs actual intelligence becomes obvious. Parts of the game that require fast reflexes and precise aiming are where the computer dominates. Parts of the game that require strategy are where the computer lags severely. One can compensate for the other to various degrees depending on the game. Look at chess. Simply by examining as much of the tree of potential moves as possible it can beat a human player even though it has none of the strategy or intuition that makes the human player good. And ridiculously powerful computers can only just barely compete with the top human players by using the massive computation model.
But that's only talking about victory. To make an immersive experience, AI could do a much better job than if/else statements, at least in theory. An enemy character that reacted to your actions in a believable way would be much more immersive than one that only responds to a couple specific stimuli and has only a couple scripted strategies. A lot of FPS AIs I would call blatantly retarded and completely wooden and predictable, and that takes you out of the game regardless of whether you give the AI unnaturally perfect aim or not.
On the other hand, I'm realistic, and AI that really behaves in a believable way without scripting is a long way off. For now, if/else is the most bang for the buck. I'm just saying good AI could make for a much better gaming experience, and much better opponents, ones that are truly vexing to beat without having to make use of perfect aiming/reaction times. And it wouldn't feel as cheap as Akuma to boot.
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But let's say yo
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The computer knows exactly where you are, exactly what you are doing, and exactly where and when that rocket will blow up. The challenge is to make the computer ignore that enough of the time to convince you that its stupid. The bot does not "see" you, it's programmed to respond to your location only when you're within X of it. Likewise, it knows exactly where and when to shoot in order to hit you, it's programmed to miss Y% of the time. Not just FPSes, the computer in Starcraft k
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While obviously "the computer" does know where you are, that information does not necessarily have to be given to the AI algorithm. Of course many times the information is given and
I concur. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is also a big problem with AI
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I read here not long ago there's a agme that does just that explicitly, I think it was _Galactic Civilizations_ or something similar. Basically during training, it sends you a message saying "I see you're building up an army to invade my/your allies but I'll pretend not to notice until you launch an attack"
Wicked!
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can simply react to any move you might do
An appropriately designed AI character would react to what the caracter would see (and how that character would respond to the input) rather than just reacting directly to the keyboard. Some games over the years have exib
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That sounds similar to Kya: Dark Lineage (PS2). It had a neat feature where your enemies would "learn" your h
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I saw a Street Fighter 3 movie where a gu
When was the game AI good? (Score:5, Interesting)
RTS AIs are a mixed bag, but in general they're doing more with less cheating than ever before. A lot of the old games cheated a LOT to make the AI competitive, but often now you'll find that they do a decent job with only minimal cheating.
Fighting games certainly aren't any easier than the ones of old, yet the AI seems to do fairly well. In some games it's almost punishingly good (Guilty Gear has some very hard AI opponents) and the player might even feel resentment over the computer's calculated reflexes.
Driving game AI hasn't improved much but frankly that's because there's not a lot to think about with driving games. Stuff like Mario Kart where there are powerups and whatnot can require a bit more smarts, but even then it's pretty simple. It's not hard to program a bot to drive around a circle. On the other hand, it's clear that in today's driving games the computer has to do a lot more work to make it around the corners. This isn't like F-Zero on the SNES where the computer completely cheated by setting its cars not to slide (in a game where controlling your sliding was 90% of the challenge).
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F-Zero AI cars also teleport directly behind you at fairly regular intervals. Just play the 1vs1AI mode (whatever it's called) and watch the enemy's blip on the map.
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I guess the AI has a hidden button to unleash the hidden Kryptonian hampster wheels under the hood.
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The Reaper Bot [mindspring.com]
I remember playing that thing when it first came out, and thinking to myself that we were on the verge of some major game AI breakthroughs. I mean, this thing played like a HUMAN, not a robot! You had to beat it with skill and cunning rather than the typical, "find the flaw in the bot and exploit it" scheme.
Of course, the Reaper wasn't perfect. Which isn't surprising when you consider that it was the first of its generation. Unfortunately, the industry
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Still, an interesting read.
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The point is to make it *feel* as real as possible. Being computer games, a little behind the scenes cheating can make that computationally feasible. Reaper was a start.
Re:When was the game AI good? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you were right in the second part of your statement, everything I've been doing in the last two and a half years would be completely meaningless. As I don't want to have wasted these years, I prefer to think that you are not right.
There's a lot to do about driving game AI. First of all, learning to drive well on complicated tracks - without cheating - is not at all straightforward. Keeping the same performance when the user is allowed to create his own tracks is even harder - most racing games rely on knowing their prefabricated tracks well, tracks which are made from a set of standard segments in order to be tractable for the AI. When you introduce more than one car on the track it gets even trickier, as you have to deal with overtaking, collision avoidance, forcing collisions, etc.
And these are just the challenges associated with generating good driving. Interesting driving has even more challenges - should you drive nicely or aggressively? How do you make the driving look human-like? How do you adapt your skill level to that of your opponents? Etc...
You can see this blog post [blogspot.com] (with videos) and this paper [togelius.com] for some of the research we are doing into this.
Pre-programmed Learning System Invalid, Then? (Score:3, Insightful)
First, a neural network is more of the same "if/else" logic as any other AI engine. It's only different in how the AI processes it's input. Sounds more to me like a programmer/theorist who's pissed at all the tricks in existence that can emulate (fairly well) basic intelligence without the use of any "classical" system like a neural network.
Furthermore, neural-network-based AIs would have to come pre-programmed. This means a neural network that starts at a certain level of development rather than a blank slate. Should bad guys have to learn when and how to fire a gun while you're playing the game? It'd make for some boring encounters.
Furthermore, most games are quite linear. There's a story to tell and you can't really insert many uncontrollable variables into a linear system and still be able to maintain consistent play experiences for your users.
I wonder if this guy has seen Spore.
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At the neuron level, sure, but AI is largely seen as a matter of the emergent properties -- behavior coming out of a system not specifically designed for it. Now you CAN get passable emergent AI out of triggers (passable for the limited scope of a game), and indeed that's what the real masters of game programming AI get paid the big bucks to do, but it's never going to get to "True" AI that people are demanding.
"True AI
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This is different from real AI, even though things like neuronal nets obviously also use if and then.
Multiplayer (Score:1)
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It's a question of quality (Score:2, Insightful)
just wait...you ain't seen nothing yet... (Score:1)
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from NaturalMotion's site:
Q: Is euphoria a physics engine? A: No, euphoria is not a physics engine. euphoria simulates the human (or animal) motor nervous system on Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3 and PC. One can think of it as biology meeting robot control theory. euphoria integrates with a game's existing physics engine, which provides the basic body physics (commonly known as 'ragdoll physics'). euphoria adds life to the dead physics simulation. In short, ragdolls are dead, floppy bodies. euphoria characters instead are alive and adaptive.
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You have to learn to separate marketing hype from reality.
The challenge is balance (Score:1)
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But there's also a rubber band on the computer's car, no matter how well the computer drives and how badly you drive, you generally can catch up.
In a real race, if you run a terrible lap, you're 20-40 seconds behind. You have no chance of catching up. You're done. Unless it's NASCAR, there's no reason to run the rest of the race, and even in NASCAR, the only reason you run is because you get points for lapping.
Imagine making
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AI isn't the problem, Gamedesign is (Score:2)
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I don't want AI (Score:1)
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Because for some people, playing with other people is more entertaining than playing against other people.
Consider D&D. Would it be more fun if it was a D&D deathmatch with 2 opposing teams of players?
Graphics vs. A.I. (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider the days of Civilization II. The graphics were decent for the day but the A.I. was generally pretty good and coupled with a good game engine (not without its faults though), the discrepancy was not that apparent.
Fast forward a few years to the console game Goldeneye. Very good graphics for its day (especially on a console) but the A.I. was starting to stagnant. There were cases where infinite baddies would flood through a door, getting mowed down continually. Of course, Goldeneye came out almost exactly a year before Half-Life, a game usually praised as having a good graphical engine (on the PC) and good A.I.
Now a few years later again, we have Half-Life 2 and FEAR and many other first person shooters which are hailed as having great A.I. But all these games still suffer. Why is that soldier jogging against the wall? Why is this character I'm supposed to be leading around getting stuck on corners and running around randomly? The developers are spending so much money on graphical engines that they expect us to be entranced immediately by the world they created, and then all of a sudden, one of the enemies (or teammates for that matter) does something extremely stupid or so abnormal, we're ripped out of this trance and forced to remember that yes, we're just playing a game.
I'm sure it's not always the developer's fault. They have a lot of pressure from all sides to make the presentation of the game great, but it's apparent that the presentation can fall flat on its face when the A.I. is brain dead. But they don't have to show the A.I. being stupid in the commercials, they can show off the graphics and the pre-rendered cutscenes.
Graphics are driving the industry and thus the industry is being driven by Nvidia, Intel, and ATI/AMD. If developers were allowed to put some of the money they used to build a state of the art graphics engine into A.I. development, I think we would be taking some great steps. Here's to no more wall-jogging Nazis.
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Compare that to graphics technology, which has advanced
FEAR? (Score:1)
AI in some games can be smart (Score:1)
This is not game specific (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a common phenomenon in the AI community. When a new method or algorithm is first proposed, which achieved gains over prior methods, it is consider "new AI." But as time goes on and the algorithm is put into common use, it degrades into "just another algorithm."
AI is really just whatever the bleeding edge happens to be. For instance the A* algorithm to find "good" paths. It's certainly an intelligent algorithm, but nobody really considers it "AI" anymore. It's just a search method.
So, is a series of if-then statements "AI?" If it's new and powerful and does stuff that no other algorithm can do, probably yes. But as time goes on it becomes just another algorithm. AI, pretty much by definition, is simply "The smartest stuff we can do as of yet."
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Maybe in marketdroid speak. In the world where I live, we use a definition of intelligence which is slightly above the congitive ability of a meat pie.
Jesus, man, the implication was "The smartest stuff we can get the computer to do unsupervised." Try reading between a lines a bit.don rose colored glasses (Score:1, Troll)
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It was simply saying "Now that graphics are better, the fact that the AI sucks is becoming more apparent"
Steve knows what he's talking about (Score:2)
AI = obsolete (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Games don't "devalue" AI (Score:3, Interesting)
The most obvious example is Deep Blue, which is probably still the most famous AI in the world. Nobody cares about the efficiency of its sorting algorithms or any other academic-level AI questions; what they care about is that it can match the world's best human in one particular game.
The same is true of the more mundane, even crappy AI you see in fighters, FPS games, etc. Those bots in Quake 3 probably weren't getting any invites to Robot MENSA, but they FELT almost as real and as dangerous as human adversaries.
Hmm (Score:2)
Stardock... (Score:2)
Games are getting better (Score:3, Insightful)
A simple rules-based system that has a bunch of if-then triggers is sufficient for a lot of things, but once you get into sophisticated behavior the number of rules becomes simply to large to generate, and the process for selecting the best action nontrivial as rules get bunched together due to equivalence, etc.
Statistical learning systems (Bayesian, etc) can be very powerful, but have not been seen in games until recently (for a great example check out Forza Motorsport 2 coming out in May, for which the AI was developed in Cambridge, UK, the MS Research building next-door to where I took my lectures on comp. text and speech processing ^_^).
The main reason that game AI is not as advanced as folks might expect is that "sophisticated," learning AI takes a significant time to develop and train. Most importantly, it requires expertise that goes beyond just being able to code C++ or Java or CLIPS or what have you. People with this expertise don't go into game programming because there they get underpaid. Rather, they go to Google or Microsoft or Yahoo or make their own company. (Indeed, Forza's AI was developed by MS rather than a 3rd party middleware dev house.) Why? BECAUSE THE REAL MONEY IS IN SEARCH!!! That's where the AI experts go, folks.
Not just AI (Score:2)
It's not just the AI that's not progressing. Behaviour in general is lagging behing hardware capabilities. For example, the newest Splinter Cell game. Consoles by now should be able to at least simulate an enemy's field of vision accurately. Apparently not. The NPCs in Splinter Cell have a very boolean field of vision, and you can be in plain view looking right at them, in good light, and they don't see you. And then if you trigger an alert, suddenly everybody's vision improves.
Crackdown is another example
Work it from the other end (Score:3, Funny)
Should even things out quite nicely IMHO.
whats the problem (Score:1)
AI pointless? (Score:1)
My suspicion as to why (Score:2)
I think one of the reasons why good AI is hard is because people assume that it's simply going to be mindless drud
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
Especially if they're not real.
Its all just a bunch of "IF/THEN" statements... (Score:2)
Sure we'll have complex weighting, etc. But If/Then ain't going anywhere....