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

hey now

[Joe the Lesser]

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*

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!

Don't clump all research together

[JanneM]

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