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AI in Video Games vs. AI in Academia
missingmatterboy writes "Dr. Ian Lane Davis, AI researcher turned game development studio head, talks briefly about the differences between AI used in the game industry and the AI being researched in academic institutions. A short read but you may find it interesting."
Academia drives reasearch that's used in the commercial world. And the commercial world implements these ideas giving a real world feedback to Academia. Basically both drive each other to new ideas and eventually new technologies.
When AI becomes advanced enough to the point where game characters can think, will they be able to examine what they're made of, and make more of themselves? Digital earths that exist on your PS10? What will we do about this if it happens?
As far as the current state of AI is concerned, what are some of the most useful applications outside of games? The robotics field I am sure makes some major use of it.
It's also true that in academia there are a lot of what we would call "toy problems" because they are of such a small scope that they don't solve a real world problem yet.
Oh, then M$ must be the greatest academic institution in existance, filling word and excel with so many useless features that won't solve a real world problem ever...
-- No sig today
Dragon Warrior 1 captured a girl's mind pretty well.
'Dost thou love me?'
'no'
'But thou must! Dost thou love me?'
'no'
'But thou must! Dost thou love me?'
*sigh*
'yes'
'I'm so happy!' *Cue music*
"I only speak the truth"
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Hey, it's "Whutchootalkinbout Willis?" I'm a keeper of direct quotes and no derivations thereof... So, don't misquote or I'll come after you!
Carbonated Sugar Water! Makes kids jump around!
how disapointing, he just confirmed my worst fears. That the Graphics may be better but the AI is still the same.
I find this particulary true for RTS games, Red Alert 2, Age of Empires 2, im sooo hoping that War Craft 3 has good worth-while AI and wont get stuck on trees or somthing stupid
p.s. that is one short interview.
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
When a computer gets grumpy and frustrated a couple of weeks before a big project is due, then I'll know it's joined our ranks...
my computer is always grumpy and frustrated... especially when it has to do cpu intensive tasks, like handling a mouseclick... *cough*
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
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Make love, not sigs
> but a human brain has 2 to the 14th power neurons...
...which is only 16384 neurons. actually it's more like 10^10 or 10^11 (depending on how you count them).
It has come to my complete attention that every advancement in the application and development of AI has proved to assimilate all of mankind beginning with seizing datalinks. Many hollywood producers have examplified this theory with such movies as Terminator 2, The Matrix, and fraggle rock. To prevent AI from developing and overthrowing the world, thus seizing Network Associates Inc.'s Internet, I must speak on behalf of all the people of the world. It is mine and Network Associates Inc.'s intention to prevent devestation of the world by shutting down the internet. It is the only way to prevent AI from communicating with itself. We at Network Associates Inc. would like to extend our helping hands and apologize for any difficulties you may experience after we shut down our exodus servers and spread a digital wire burn to remove all the data links. We at Network Associates Inc. are pioneers in communication and security: our solution for this disruption in service is to evolve a new transport medium. Please sign-up for the pony express today! The Internet shall be shutdown and the pony express re-instated on August 29, 2029. Thankyou for your time.
Sincerely,
Bob
For more details, please visit our mirrored website.
Apparently you can confine consciousness to its own reality.
"Lara Croft stole my credit card number and ordered 700 Stark Trek collector plates."
Table-ized A.I.
"And speaking of computing power, even a fast machine today can process about 2 billion instructions per second, but a human brain has 2 to the 14th power neurons and 2 to the 16th power connections between them, all of which can be active at the same time, so we've got a way to go in terms of pure horsepower even if we knew how to achieve it, which we don't yet."
Sure shoots down the argument that we only use a certain percentage of our brains, doesn't it?
Also shows how far we really haven't gone when it comes to computing and AI.
This seems a bit much even for Wired. The creatures in these games are following a predefined set of rules, certainly they are a complex set of rules, but the way they "learn" is entirely predetermined (that is, what they learn depends on what they are exposed to, but the formula for converting exposure into knowledge is set by the game designers). I think the fact that the graphics are rendered so realistically makes it easier to make the leap to thinking they are really acting "intelligent."
Who knows what really sets human intelligence apart, is it ability to make rules or nondeterministic memory or whatever, but it seems evident (to me, in my ever-so-humble opinion) that these creatures don't have it.
- adam
Did the article really say 2^14 and 2^16, or is Lynx messing something up?
I think I have more neurons that 16384...
Just idly wondering, if they/some other companies posted some of their AI research online (not anything proprietary), and let the world take a look at it and comment, would it result in better AI development? Or just a million people saying "Duh, I don't think like that!" a million different times?
How about this: post a "quick reaction" test, where you have to read the question and reply within 5-10 seconds. Since we don't know how humans think, we could at least pool together the end-results of a million people's first thoughts on certain subjects/arrangements/pattern learning/etc. and mine the data for any interesting trends. Perhaps having such a large sample would help in certain aspects of AI research?
Hard work has a future payoff. Laziness pays off now.
Thanks.
I submit that AI is already good enough to substitue for most human interactions.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Biological neurons have been shown in the laboratory to grow new connections based on information learned. In a robot, what possible mechanism could guide such growth? Programming is the only answer, but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't self-contained, as it were.
There is no other way for "mental" activity to be guided, thus AI will always be as unattainable as the Philosopher's Stone.
Most video games I've played had a pretty simple AI algorithm:
Easy - Computer player doesn't cheat
Medium - Computer cheats and always knows where you are or what you are doing
Hard - Computer cheats and is allowed to break the rules.
If game programmers spent more time writing smart (as opposed to cheating) computer opponents and less time trying to get 10 million more polygons on the screen, todays games might actually be worth buying.
On the other hand the game industry hasn't really used a lot of the research academia has come up with. It would be really cool to see some text-to-speech stuff in games. That would probably make the dialogue in games a whole lot better.
PK
This is a big debate in the AI community. They're devided into the "strong" and "weak" camps.
Strong AI says that it's entirely possible to make computer programs that think and feel just like humans. After all, all human thought is the result of chemical processes which obey the laws of nature and can thus be described algorithmically.
Weak AI says that it's impossible to ever create a computer program that really thinks and feels and loves and hates like a human. The best we can hope for is to simulate these thoughts to create a close approximation.
Of course no computer system out there today can recreate the complexity of the human brain.
Who besides Mr. Hollings has a brain with only 2 to the 14th (==16384) neurons in it? I think they almost certainly meant 10 to the 14th - which is bigger by a factor of more than six billion. To put those numbers in perspective, if every human being on earth had 2^14 neurons, the total of all of them would be a little less than 10^14. Who proofread this?
"I don't think all those AI coders out there are thrilled by the idea that their lifes work is used for games
Maybe they're thrilled, maybe they aren't. Aside from conducting interviews with the researchers themselves, we really don't have any way of knowing. That's sort of beside the point, though.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that both applications probably benefit each other, although possibly not in the way most people might think. When I started out programming, a lot of my initial projects were focused on game development. A recurring theme in my thinking was ways to make the computer opponent "smarter", which naturally led me to wonder how I could make the computer learn new tactics and adapt to the human player's actions. As I quickly learned, adaptive systems research is serious stuff.
So, I decided to dig into whatever materials I could get my hands on related to artificial intelligence research and theory. To be honest, I never really got very far, but it remains an interest of mine to this day. I'd be willing to bet some of tomorrow's leading AI researchers are playing video games today. That seems like a pretty good benefit to me.
I guess the key point is this: if a particular application of a certain technology gets people excited about it, and interested in researching it, it's a Good Thing.
What games do you guys think are the best/most interesting in terms of AI?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
So what games have you played that have the coolest AI?
The amount of AI in computer games must be quite low - or at least, of the VERY artifical variety. Most games will attempt to give the NPCs (non player characters) the appearance of AI, without actually having any. Two main methods go here, I reckon.
(a) "bots" like those in quake, half-life etc. - have a knowledge of where the player is, make the bot face the player and shoot etc. Characterised by them having little or no weapon selection - all of the opponents have only one weapon which they use exclusively. Some have varying tactics, but these usually fall back on range - i.e. shoot from far away, claw at face at point blank. There are small variants to this rule - the marines in half-life for example, throw grenades if you run round corners away from them.
(b) Mass tactics. Games like Dune, starcraft, etc. Build units in the right order, building placements and building rates pre-conceived by the designer at the level- or engine- design stage. Attack in the same way, defend in the same way. No variety, don't deal well with players switching tactics.
There is very little intelligence here - compare with chess games which actually think about the consequences of their actions at "run-time".
One of the main goals of AI in games is to make the computer do things that look like a reasonable person (not necessarily an opponent) would have done them. It doesn't matter if the underlying models are elegant or extensible or whatever. It just needs to make the game fun. But in academic AI, what matters is to get good models, good theory, etc. Academic AI is geared towards the long run. Game AI can be really simple -- for example, you could watch how 100 humans play the game, and try to encode their strategies into the computer player. That kind of "AI" would be uninteresting to academic researchers, but it could make for a fun game.
Computer: "Dum de dum, let's send single soldiers one at a time down this pass lined with two dozen of the player's turrets! Yeah, that's a sure-fire strategy!"
*shakes head* Those games are so easy once you figure out the computer's behaviour.
Another one I love is Homeworld. "Let's send our entire fleet straight at the player mothership! Hmm, what are these little things? Mines? Dunno what those are, let's just plow through."
Is it just me, or is playing defensively is the best way to win those games?
By the time the release the GB version [no idea how the japanese versions worked] they finally fixed that, so that she'd get a clue after you kept saying no.
... oh, I longed for an Ultima style killing fest upon Tantegel!
They also made it so, if you said "Yes" to the dragonlord, you wake up in Rimuldar thinking it was a dream
Probably a better question is what is AI? The term Artificial Intelligence spurs the imagination and has an almost mystical sound to it, but in reality there are a lot of (seemingly) simple things encompassed by the AI field.
Some examples everyone can relate to:
Real-time spell and grammar checks in MS Word with autocorrection.
Pathfinding: Mapquest uses it. Your cable-modem-router uses it too.
Fuzzy logic: An oven that hovers 1 or 2 degrees around the target temperature instead of going 5 degrees above the target and then shutting off until it falls 15 degrees below the target.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
I have been working (mostly) in AI since the 1980s, but by far, the most fun I have had was working on AI at Angel Studios for Nintendo and Disney-Quest.
Not much "AI" though really. I started out with complicated multi-agent stuff - and that did not have a happy ending. For realtime games and VR, simple stuff worked (e.g., in a VR environment, have animals snap their head around and stare briefly at you when you come into their environment).
A few years ago, I wrote up a short paper on games and AI that is avaliable at www.markwatson.com under "Short Papers".
A little off topic: every programmer should work in the game industry, at least for a while :-)
Angel Studio was definitely the most fun job I every had!
-Mark
Maybe he meant 2 * 10^14, which would at least only be 3 orders of magnitude off.
A much closer approximation is 100,000,000,000 neurons, and 5,000 times that many connections.
(For more on the number of neurons in the brain, see R.W. Williams and K. Herrup, Ann. Review Neuroscience, 11:423-453, 1988)
If a single neuron could perform the equivilant of an instruction, then human brains would only be 100-1000 times more powerful than a modern desktop computer, probably less when you consider that they're more like a beowolf cluster than a single powerful computer.
-- Spam Wolf, the best spam blocking vaporware yet!
It would be impressive if the game's AI coaxes the player to reveal if they actually paid for the game or pirated it, and shut down if pirated.
Table-ized A.I.
When looking at AI and Cognitive research, you really have to keep in mind that there are two differwent motivations at work in doing the research.
One motivation - the one alluded to in the article - is to make stuff that gives the same behavior as humans (or whatever animal you are looking at). You don't really care whether your methods are biologially correct, you want things that work. Most of classical AI falls into this category.
The other motivation is to figure out how we do things (we being animals in general). If the research ends up being useful in appolications, great, but that's not the goal of the work. You really want models of how real brains solve problem, and these models may be far too inomplete or computationally intensive to be used in implementations, yet be perfectly fine for their intended use. A lot of Cognitive science falls into this category.
Game AI designers probably have a much richer mine of information and techniques in AI than in cognitive research, and they have so far been able to exploit that knowledge - as well as judicious 'cheating' - to make a compelling illusion. If/when they turn to cognitive science, however, the pickings will be slimmer and harder to use, as the methods and models aren't designed to solve any kind of real-world problems to begin with.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
...talks briefly about the differences between AI used in the game industry and the AI being researched in academic institutions.
This is easy, one is a highly optimized tool for maximum destruction and domination that can be calibrated according to the environment it is placed in, and the other is just part of a video game.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Now that we've been told, yet again, how limited AI is can we take away their moderator privledges? The AIs keep moding me offtopic...damn metaphorically challenged silicone... Oh no here they come again...
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship
You'll get there eventually.
The enemies of Democracy are
This posting quotes from the book to make this point.
Most households were first introduced to computers by video games. It does not surprise me that the first introduction to AI for many people is computer games. I realize that spell checking and grammer checking, a form of AI, may be in many houses too.
Even the military is using game-developed technology for combat simulators.
And why are they harboring a grudge?
As someone who does not do games for a living, I find more and more that solutions offered for many games can be more than useful in the 'serious' industry of IT. Way back in the day when 3D was still new to games, the simulator crowd was in high demand for game production. (at least their experience and lessons learned were) Now it seems that more and more gaming solutions could be used for elegant solutions in simulations and distributed information systems (real time). Take the MMOG / persistent world creators... their experience in handling a ton of people with loads of information over the internet, while minimizing lag, cheating (security) and synch problems would be a great boon for MANY systems that are completely unrelated to games. Many in the 'serious' industry scoff at this. Funny thing is, I have done this btw, do an experiment where you present architecture, algorithms and personell that can fulfill the requirements and present it to someone 'up the chain'. They will like it and the ideas presented. now try a month later but add 'game creator/designer/developer' in the personell places and mention that the algorithms are from the 'game world'. You will see a complete 180.
That clearly shows that many put their knee-jerk emotions in front of rational business deciding ability, and should IMO be fired or put in non-decision making capacity positions. Use what works!
It would appear that Dr. Davis' company Mad Doc Software has aquired the Jane's Combat Simulation licencing. Some of us old timers may remember EA was the previous holder of the licence, and after a promising start, ran it into the ground. The product, which has just gone gold, looks like a promising WW2 air sim. Here's hoping for sucsess to Dr. Davis and company
X short read
- good read
- quick read
- interesting read
- fun read
- must read
....................
/. staff strike again...ain't imagination a wonderful thang...
It seems to me there is a large disparity in the kind of development between the two different kind of AI investigations. Game AI, although more about the 'result' as stated in the article, has to be based upon the research done in the academia. While it says academia could learn a thing or two by understanding what GAMES are using from AI, they can better focus and optimize and even research better platforms for the games to use (This is just paraphrasing some of what the article might have said, including my own interpretion, if at all accurate).
What I've noticed is, since the human brain knowledge IS 85% speculation, we often use AI strategies to fake knowledge. I mean for FPS bots, they have used paths and nodes to simulate familiarity and some order for the bot, but still that gets too much into a pattern which is not necessarily very human.
I guess my main concern is knowing exactly how far Game AI trails the progress of Academia AI, and when, if ever, the two will progress together.
An (electronic) neural net is a state machine. So a better comparison would probably be transistors verses neurons.
I'm sure their are numbers out there, but the data provided does nothing to indicate how fast the neurons can process data.
Missle defense navigation systems are based on parallel neural-cubes to recognize and react in microsend time intervals.
Memory cache management software is based on genetic algorithms.
Data-mining in huge data-warehouses is based on decision trees and pattern recognition.
Stanford's ontology management system. Semantic Web.
Should I continue? It's all real today. May you expect something of Spielberg's A.I.? Japan is already on that way. What do you need more?
void Kill (void)
{
while (no_of_players > 0)
{
search(target_list[]);
hit_me = target_list;
while (hit_me != NULL)
{
aim_railgun(hit_me);
fire();
hit_me++;
}
}
return;
}
I had an idea for an AI system that would learn a language by analyzing a dictionary file with things like definitions, synonyms, antonyms, etc. with a concept of nouns, verbs, and other grammatical things. This was a few years ago, so my complete idea is a little cloudy now. I never implemented it because I was pretty bad at file input/output, and that was important to the way that the program would have worked.
It was a pleasure for me, as an AI prof. who does games-related research, to read this interview. IMHO Dr. Davis gave a brief but extremely accurate and informative sketch of the relationship between industrial AI and AI research. I wish that every "expert" publically commenting about AI could be as insightful and honest.
For example, computer vision -- there are publicly-traded companies out there which have been doing machine vision for YEARS. These systems are used by all major chip manufacturers, most major paper and textile manufacturers, etc. to catch recognize and catch defects in products before they leave the assembly line. Cognex is a $1B a year company -- they exclusively do machine vision and visual pattern recognition for industrial applications.
Another example of a company applying AI would be Virage, who has several patents relating to image/video searching and indexing.
Many investment houses use neural networks to profile and model investments, and plenty of large financials use expert systems and neural networks to for data mining, employee profiling, and so on.
Expert systems have been applied to computer security as well -- Rapid 7 (my company) sells a network security scanner which uses the Jess expert system from Sandia labs. The value of the expert system is, it allows the product to use discovered vulnerabilities to further exploit the network, discovering more vulnerabilities, which enable more probes to be performed, etc.
I'm still waiting for Mentifex to post some inane comment about his Javascript/FORTH AI
When I saw this headline I thought Al Gore was appearing in video games. I thought he's gone a long way down from vice-president. :o)
Video Game cheats, hints a
I'm sick of people asking "When will we see widespread commercial application of AI". AI researchers often quote the so-called "moving frontier" problem, that is, as soon as an AI application becomes useful enough to solve real-world problems, it ceases to be known as AI and looks a whole lot more mundane.
Could it be because it was never AI to begin with? I am sick and tired of the GOFAI (good old fashioned AI) community pasting the AI label on every clever computer application out there so they can cover up their failure to come up with human-level AI. People are not stupid. They can tell the difference between automatic cruise control and HAL. The former is not AI, it's just a clever hack. The latter has real intelligence. Let's face it. The GOFAI research community has failed. They had no clue as to what intelligence is about when they started the field fifty years ago and they have no clue now. We need new blood and new ideas in AI research.
I believe that using the words "artificial intelligence" to denote your oponents in most videogames is a bad choice.
A Counterstrike bot has a very limited number of choices in a controlled environmente. Same goes for your Warcraft oponent. Inteligence, on the other hand, is about the ability to improvise under unexpected circumstances.
In other words, even if they're both usually called "artifitial intelligence", they're two altogether different things.
I recently attended a recruitment presentation for codemasters in the uk.
One of the most interesting things that was said was the clever AI in games is a myth, most AI is just a series of hacks. Some of them are indeed complex but they never really make any serious attempt to scientifically replicate the way a human makes decisions.
AI is the broad term of using a computer to solve problems... Mainly they deal with stuff that has robotic flavor: computer vision and pathing. I wish people would get their act together, and just make an all encompassing true AI.
Get computer visioning to determine what object its looking at.
Use a 3d world to enhance this, and draw contextual clues.
Use a zork like vocabulary to do actions in its imaginary world.
Its so simple, but would take a long time to piece together...
I'm trying to solo it LOL:
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager/ai
As far as games go, the MMORPG I wrote that I never published had some pretty complex AI... read about it:
www.ebayrp.bizland.com
But right now I'm living basically like a bum... Even though I have the know how to make AI like HAL.
God spoke to me
I wonder what relation this Mad Doc Software company has to the 1C:Maddox Games, the producer of the famous IL2Sturmovik that beats now all the ratings in on-line simulation charts.
It would be impressive if the game's AI coaxes the player to reveal if they actually paid for the game or pirated it, and shut down if pirated.
"To continue, type in the first word on page X of the manual..."
P*e^(ni)+s
The neuron could very well be a computer within a computer (so to speak). A biomolecular computer.
Your post sparked an idea (see a computer do that?). Why not have a company sponsor an online MUD. Really low cost to us, and an AI test-bed for them. Pleople basically get to experience an AI growing up while having fun.
Yeah, its not the best idea I realize, but it would be fun I think. Not to mention that the benefit to games from creating virtual worlds more of the simulator sort, and less of the Diablo sort might really appeal to many (I know it would to me :)
Taking advantage of the player base (not abusing mind you) already there, while applying more advanced and dynamic models (for example: economic models, social response to stimuli modeling, etc). I admit that I have a strong bias for making better online games and that the simulator/modeling approach while interesting, may just be some justification to fund better dynamics into the very static and boring MMOG games... and of course that is MY opinion, so feel free to disagree.
Spelling and grammer errors aside, I have actually thought this out for quite awhile, but am too lazy to write good now (I am cooking).
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.
For other genres we tend to just put more enemies there and make them take more hits (so its a war of attrition).
However for sports games sometimes we do it properly, and sometimes we do it by making the AI really clever, and then make it make deliberate mistakes a certain proportion of the time.
These are all nice and cheesy ways to add difficulty levels.
The brain is one of the most complex systems human kind is aware of. It is much more than just neurons and their interconnections. Exactly in what way they are interconnected and specifically what roles neurotransmitters and other chemicals play is still poorly understood. Its much more than a matter of reproducing these connections and hoping some emergent behavior looks intelligent.
If you give a child all of the little bolts and screws and parts from a nuclear submarine and ask him to put them together the result will very likely be quite unintelligible.
Besides, if there ever is a computer as complex as the human brain Bill Gates will likely throw Windows on it and we'll all be doomed.
Have you played Halo?? It's pretty difficult (specially Legendary). The enemy AI is pretty good, even the marines AI is good enough.. they'll cover you, avoid explosions, find enemies, work as a team, etc.. I read an interview with the halo's AI programmer and he said that their AI is so good that the computer never cheats... He also mentioned that the Legendary mode (most difficult) is actually the way the game was designed to be played.. They saw it was too difficult and they made the easier modes so that the player could cheat. By this I mean that they give weaker armour and weapons to the enemy and the human player actually gets better weapons and enemy. Therefore you don't give the enemy enought time to show you how good the AI is.. This way, the game makes you feel that the AI is not as good in the easier modes, but its the same.. I'll post where I read the interview when I find it..
This is of course computationally expensive. In the video game case, the program must run smooth in order for the computer to be a significant opponent. A typical team of computer-controlled oppenents tend to share information as if telepathic. The computer must cheat, simply to make the game interesting. If all agents (soccer players) have a shared knowledge base, it can easily be a tough opponent. The computer must often "cheat" for this reason.
For right now, computers are not fast enough to handle the AI with more integerity. The bottom line is that a video game has to be fun. In academia, we are able to put more time into things that are not immediately useful in order to better understand real AI. Of course in the soccer video game situation, the human player also acts as a shared knowledge base for its team, as it controls all of them. In a game like a multi-player shooter, however (ignoring the chatting option), this is more applicable. It is unfair for each computer player to be able to divine the intent of the team members as if controlled by an overmind. Applying this research to video games would result in better realism, provided the CPU could handle it. For now, it would simply not make for a very interesting game. Still, shared knowledge is an interesting problem in AI, and a lot of the work having been done is quite good. But we do have a long way to go.
This research would apply to systems other than video games where each agent may work under a different protocol. Each situation is different, though. Often there will be a standard communication protocol, but sometimes that may break. The distributed system should not cease in this case. Examples are automated military, network routing, manufacturing plants and clustered computing.
I studied AI briefly in college... and ended up studying comparative religion. What it came down to was this: computer scientists are trying to determine how to make a "thinking" machine, and artificial "intelligence". We would talk a little bit about ethics -- "would it be ethical to pull the plug on an artificial intelligence?" -- and about non-binary thought, but all this left me with more questions than answers.
But what is thinking? what is intelligence? Can human intelligence truly be separated from our bodies? how do we account for desires, fears, joys? how do we account for emotions? Do not all of these contribute to intelligence and thinking? These are factors to consider when discussing thinking machines and artifical intelligence. Some AI researchers do -- and I have to admire them for it.
However, what I've noticed in the years since I studied AI in college is that AI is being used as a catch-all term for "fuzzy logic" and pattern recognition -- great for creating games that challenge us -- but leaving me with the same questions today as I had over a decade ago.
My research involves modeling human language acquisition, grounded in "visual" experiences. While I'm pretty much developing a crude vision system from scratch for my prototype (because I want to use some real video) my next step will be to try the same logic inside of a game engine. With a game engine, I can query exact details of objects and their motions, without the great complexities of a computer vision system.
Until computer sensor systems catch up, game engines provide a wonderful opportunity for testing A.I.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen a link to this article from Technology Review a few months back.
It discusses the move from classical AI to more business oriented AI field of today. The key: business application = research funding. Sure we all want Artificial Men (that's what it all comes down to doesn't it?) but who's going to pay for it.
Actually there is some interesting work IBM is doing on fruit recognition. You know those self-help check-outs at the market? The problem is that you need to have human interaction (and monitoring) for weighing up fruit (due to the difference in price/lbs.).
What these guys are doing is a recognition system that would recognize different fruits and number (since some, like apples, are done by number not weight). Now this is a non-trivial task even for humans(how good are you at telling a plantine from a banana? Or an oversized orange from a grapefruit?) and add in the translucent bag and the shuffle and you get a lot of headaches. And their work seems very promising.
Of course it isn't AI as we all want it but life ain't the Jetsons. Who wants to deal with sentience when a few damn filters and some boosting of some classifiers suffices?
What is music when you despise all sound?
The "moving frontier" dilemma is false.
When will we have "real" AI? When our software
angents are like living things - when we attempt
to explain their motivations and inner workings
but for the most part fail...
Until then they are just dutifully carrying out
our instructions.
It might be a good thing if game developers could fund academic work. No single game developer could afford to fund a project to solve any particular problem, but financial mechanisms have been described (1 2) to allow game developers to jointly fund research to produce results sharable by the entire industry.
The software completion bond idea has not yet been attempted AFAIK. Certainly it has no well-known success stories. Maybe this would be a good place to try it.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Confidential.
:-P
As seen in Robocop.
For the most part academic AI falls into the catagory of engineering optimization. How can we design object X using: (neural nets, evolutionary computation, logic reduction...)on beuwulf clusters using weeks of computation so that it will perform well under condition Z in the real world?
Game AI, however, is based on the universe created inside the game, is mostly asthetic, and usualy done in real time.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
It seems obvious that there is already a fusion between the games industry and universities. Where do the games companies get their programmers from?
After the academics have done the real pioneering work, the other programmers pick it up a decade later. This pattern has been established in AI since the 1950's. Everyone is writing AI chess programs today using the techniques of min-max pruning invented in the 1950's to solve the chess playing problem.
Now getting to a game related problem that has been vexing me:
I contribute some code to a Civilisation clone: Freeciv at www.freeciv.org.
Currently we are badly stumped at trying to create an AI that
1.) Learns from mistakes - maintains a database of losing/winning games. I'm talking something similar to Case Based Reasoning here.
2.) Plays 2D geography well. This problem space is far simpler than RTS games. I need help in basic things like identifying bottlenecks, forming and moving units in cohesion.
My prediction, made in /. and elsewhere is that the first real A.I. (as opposed to just use of A.I. software techniques) will come from some part of the entertainment industry- a robo-toy, game avatar, love-bot, or film character. People just love to play (a hard-core mammalian habit) and will stop at no lengths to invent more creative diversions for ourselves. The other potential drivers of the first A.I.- academic research, military, and business- just dont have the same the same deep intensity as "play".
1. You should never break or accelerate in a turn until the car has reached the apex of the curve. Doing so, especially at high speeds will cause the car to skid out. Break before the turn.
2. If you're going up hill, you will increase, not decrease, speed if you go to a lower gear. Lower gears mean more power is getting to the engine. Your car would stall otherwise.
The first point would be particularly hard to compensate for with AI in your scenario unless the car had some kind of input akin to sight.
All that and more learned from playing GT/Project Gotham... who says you don't learn from games?!
Ivan
There is no graceful way to eat an egg salad sandwich.
I didn't wait to see what happens when you hit redline...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.