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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."
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
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 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.
Cruise control could be very well formulated as an AI problem. There is sensor noise from the speedometer. There are uphills and downhills and different road conditions. In this case, it probably boils down to "just" a Kalman filter, but a Kalman filter easily qualifies as machine learning.