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."

Comments

Academia AI and Game AI

[Screaming Lunatic]

The reason a lot of AI research is not implemented in games is because it is just too slow. A typical assignment for an introductory course in AI at university is to implement a bunch of algorithms to solve an N-Puzzle. The fastest implementation can take a few seconds to solve, with the slowest taking on the order of about 10mins. This just isn't feasible for games where you need to spit out a frame every 30ms. A lot of algorithms just aren't suited for real-time applications.

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

How many?

[AnotherBlackHat]

I though this was funny, probably misquoted:

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

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!

AI in the real world?

[possible]

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.

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.