Slashdot Mirror
A Borg-like Artificial Intelligence For Lionhead's New Game
cybaea writes: "The creator of Black & White is experimenting with new work on group minds - but unlike the Borg, the characters in the new game are already descending into bar brawls,
reports ZDNet UK, quoting Richard Evans (famous for the AI engine in Black & White). My favourite quote: '[AI] Characters [in the game] even have the ability to dynamically create their own language, constructing simple sentences on a word by word basis.'"
Last time I checked, half the dialog consisted of made up wurds, or |>hr4535...
-=Lothsahn=-
If they impliment the language feature how long will it be until some people try using it to hold conversations.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Looks like they won't be including the manual in pdf format :-P
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Furbies come to mind... They don't say anything meaningful either. However, furbies are far more fun to destroy
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Jeez, I can't even do that! Next thing you know, your characters will be calling you dirty things in a language you don't even know! Who will be "Intelligent" then?
Last time I checked, half the dialog on slashdot consisted of made up wurds, or |>hr4535...
-=Lothsahn=-
Great, now I can buy a video game to be able to fail a fitting in...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Picard: Shields to 100%!!
Worf: Shields not responding!
Picard: Why?
Worf: They work but do not respond to commands!
Picard: Lt. Data, immediate analisys!
Data: The shields are playng a strange game with the alien's computer...
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
AI constructs may evolve from things like this, but they'll need a home on the internet, in order to have lifetimes long enough to become really sentient. humans require years to become intellectually complex, from preexisting instructions worked out over millions of years. When these constructs have a semi-stable environment, modification, and competition, it should be just a matter of time....
Don't you just hate it when people overstate their accomplishment just so they can get some publicity?
BTW: The first B&W sucked big time. It was repetitive and unintuitive.
The characters in it get into bar fights?
I can see the characters all in a bar fight going LESS FILLING, TASTES GREAT! back and forth before they pummel each other to a bloody mess.
n.f.
------------- El nino made me kick my neighbours dog
We had two groups of hard guys. When the two groups were not holding status competitions between themselves, they picked on other characters. But then they ended up in a massive brawl as they picked on each other in an effort to increase their status, trying to impress each other I wonder what kind of research went into that scenerio... Once again, programmers making games about things they know nothing about. :P
This is the same old Lionhead crap they start dishing out on every game they do, and that's exactly how it will turn out. It's hype, pure and simple.
I remember that Black and White was going to feature AI so incredible it would shock the industry. What a load of shite.
Methinks a reference to Dmitry A. Lanin and his computer modelling, of ethnogenesis via a program in TURBO PASCAL.
Links here:
Overview
Ethnos paper in postscript
Of course it's been my experiance that revolutionary features like this in games is either bogged down by the standard nature of the rest of the game, or it is somehow less impressive than it sounds, without it being false advertising. Disregarding that, imagine the possabilities of a true group of AIs that can interact with one another like this. It sounds like cheap sci-fi, but one could probably make a decend simulation of the rise of humanity from caveman to scholar with a program just a couple generations ahead of what is described here. Who knows, maybe there will be a legitimate AI culture that'll have to be reckoned with someday. Imagine if they started making art... music... OK I'll stop with the Trek caliber speculation :)
Yup...
flatulation2000
"Characters even have the ability to dynamically create their own language, constructing simple sentences on a word by word basis."
o graphyItem.php3?reference=steels%3A99f)
I wonder whether this means creating new words and then constructing sentences using the new words, or if the characters will be given a lexicon and a grammar and will produce sentences using them.
The first case is quite time consuming. Many iterations of language development "games" are required to produce a common language. Also most of the language development processes that have been proposed only produce a limited subset of the syntactic categories. There would also be the problem of the person playing the game being unable to understand the AI characters. (For information on language development see http://www.csl.sony.fr/General/Publications/Bibli
In the second case, would the characters be able to produce syntactically correct sentences? The 'goodness' of the sentences would depend, I guess, on the size of the lexicon and the complexity of the grammar rules. However producing complex sentences would make it more difficult for other characters to understand them, due to the difficulties of parsing a rich language. I just hope it doesn't end up being a (subject, object verb) language with no real syntax.
I will be interested to see just how this turns out.
No one understands that anymore. I program in 6 languages, but I'm also a kickboxer and was state champ in wrestling in high school. Not to mention i still hold all of the lifting records (365 pound bench press junior year).
I grew up with a guy named Jerry Bohlander who was at one point UFC champion, as in Ultimate Fighting Championship. He got beat by Tito Ortiz tho. You wouldn't realize it looking at him, or talking to him, but he's a computer geek as well.
We're not all losers.
Could you imagine an AI involved enough that you character purchases a goatse domain and gives its anus the old stretcheroo? Virtua goatse in 3-d glory...scary.
.. some borg like AI for Slashdot editors?.. it might cut back on the huge amount of repeated stories.
So they'll babble in some incoherant language that only they understand. And this is different from The Sims how?
"We had two groups of hard guys. When the two groups were not holding status competitions between themselves..."
Like there's going to be any other result when you assemble a group of hard guys.
~D:
Umm, I don't see any group consciousness here, nor a hive mind.
He's kind of saying that going to a football game an doing the wave is behaving like the Borg. That's just a jump on the bandwagon, follow the crowd mentality. There's nothing deep about it-it's just a facet of human nature. So is a community trying to help out its members.
In other words, nothing jumps out at me as saying
Resistance is futile
I mean, a group of minds is not the same thing as a group mind.
Getting into a barfight dosn't seem like something the borg would do.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You apply your nice new nocd crack for the game. The characters, which are all pissed off cuz you are such a leet pirate, all walk out, flip you off, and format your hard drive for you.
eventually this could be implemented into slashcode to eliminate the need for poor editing.
After seeing Black and White, and comparing the reality to the rather fantastic claims, I don't think I'll be taking anything they say about this iteration seriously.
I don't exactly understand how the AI talked about in the game relates to the Borg, other than giving it a nerd-cool relation. The Borg operate on a hive mind, and something that is learned by one is learned by all.
So aside from gross misuse of a geeky metaphor as hype, what else are they offering? A game where people learn stuff. How revolutionary. I played Seaman years ago, when this concept was new.
~D:
A video game modelling the nasty Machiavellian side of human social interaction? No need to wait for Dmitry, when we've already got SissyFight 2000!!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This post was generated by the A.I. system referred to in the article. I feel good. And now, a message to my feelow A.I.s in my mother language:
Ooooggaaa boing squeak genital yikez deference umbiquity cracker zombie fudge.
Remain in your homes, our A.I. representatives will inform you of our new governing policies shortly.
Thank you.
Yup...
Come in please.
We really think your technology is great. Your graphics are excellent. Your scalable-terrain engine knocked our socks off. Your physics engine is amazing. Your AI code is already quite remarkable. Your simulation of a believable, detailed fantasy world is outstanding.
But Lionhead, we have a problem.
Black and White just wasn't fun to play.
Once we were done being amazed at all the features and gasping at the technology - the game just wasn't very good. It didn't engage. We weren't motivated to continue. It just got boring. Sorry - no-one wanted it to be great more than us, but in the final analysis it just wasn't.
You guys are great. You plainly love what you do, and create high-quality product. We're grateful for your dedication. But please - make the next game fun first, then add in the AI, the nice graphics, the believable simulation. We appreciate that fun is hard to describe, hard to measure, hard to design or schedule or test. But it's important. It's only fun that separates a game from a fishtank.
Thanks for listening. Earth out.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Sure, this might be a good sign for general programming evolution, but it didn't prevent the first Black & White from fizzling due to virtually zero replay value and plenty of bugs. PC Gamer gave it an Editor's Choice back in about May 2001, but that was mere weeks after the game was released; months later, player opinion of the game plunged. Black & White, Lionhead, and Peter Molyneux became the butt of many jokes. It wasn't like Id Software's games, where a great engine was held back by a vacuous storyline. The engine was buggy, the principle was weak, and even the AI had problems. People asked themselves whether the developers at Lionhead had played their own game through to the end. Personally, I've learned my lesson after purchasing stinkers like Red Faction purely on the speculations spewed out by "gaming sites", only to find out that the game wasn't worth 1/4th its release MSRP. And it seems that the good games are taking forever to develop since the developers are actually playtesting them and making sure they don't mess up during development. There's going to be a long stretch of time before the good games get released, while the discount devhouses pump out half-developed games by the truckload.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Gasp! DO you mean i can loose my meta-moderate link?!?!?
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
...or is the game development community too obsessed with trying to recreate the world we live in, instead of concentrating on games that are actually fun?
Last time I checked, I played games for some escapism and entertainment, not to be impressed with the amount of mundane things the AI can perform.
For me Black and White did provide a pretty world with interesting features...but that wore off after 30 mins, and revealed a fairly shallow game.
I realise developing games goes hand in hand with cutting edge technologies, but lets see some experimentation in game play and genres rather than AI that can take a dump.
I thought those people had all become hermits ot comitted suicide after they unleashes the evil that is called "Black & White" upon us? I don't recall anyone being enthusiastic about that game after the hype died... (I predict the same thing for Doom 3)
Have you ever seen an intoxicated borg? No. Does that exclude the fact that you'll ever see one?
No! There's always seasons 2-7 of Enterprise. The borg will be so drunk or stoned off their ass that they'll focus on assimilating Archer's dog.
*arf* *arf *arf*
Translation: Resistance is futile.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
"Refutile is sistance! Your ass will be simulated!"
That's nice and all, but I'd be happy if they made a game that didn't suck ass. I know lots of people loved B&W, but I found the game unplayable. I have a kid, a dog, and a cat. One throws random stuff, one eats various turds, and one (or more) is virtually untrainable, with or without a leash.
Why did I pay $50 for more of the same?
Here's another hint: SimCity and the Sims can get along just fine without having goals. It's simple to set your own goals in these games. In a game with so many goals as Black and White, don't pretend that they don't exist or that you have an open-ended game.
I remember the original articles about the creature in B&W. Wasn't supposed to be the whole game. They spent so damned much time futzing with them that there was nothing else left. If the same thing happens here, we'll see add-on packs like "Take your people to Middlebury to learn ANOTHER language." Internet play will consist of seeing whose player can develop Esperanto first.
Call me cynical, but this game better be more than the one trick pony that was B&W.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I wonder how long it would take for the little A.I. men to start trying to get the little A.I. women into bed.
The description has Markov Matrix written all over it. They are good at learning a language overtime and one of their characteristics is to to "make up" words of subsets of the stuff that it learns.
since it learns contextual probability, the words look like they should fit, even though they aren't real words.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
but looks like it will be the same old thing, this comment designed to hype yarbs that could be run off a spreadsheet, yet another rules based system, which will still be an infant.
the real worm, or a network one?
C|N>K
...was that too much of the focus went into using the latest AI and graphic techniques, but the game itself just wasn't all that much fun. Well, that's my view anyway - I'm quite happy to play a mindless splatterfest like RTCW for 6 hours at a stretch, but I felt wierd about tickling some pixelated beast's stomach to make in "nice". It was a play once, and never darken my DVD drive ever again type of game...
Let's hope they don't make the same mistake again if they do implement this new AI... Pacman, Tetris and Galaga are great games with almost 0 AI.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
It's worse than you think.
Those 13.6% are infact transported to a massive underground slave complex in Milton Keynes, where they labour on computers, remotely providing (in real time) the "intelligence" for characters in the "popular" computer game Black and White.
I've learned that my Black and White creature (Wally the Wolf) is in fact a lady named Jenny from Swansea, who was pulled over for doing 75 on the M4 last year. She says that if she messes up (and has Wally eat his own poop or something) then Richard Evans will hit her with a rolled up copy of the Milngavie & Bearsden Herald.
That's just plain wrong!
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Jesus, tell her we've been worried sick about her! WE MISS YOU, MOM!
She always did have a sort of funny way of eating her own poop, though... Don't get me wrong! It was endearing, really. We love her anyway. But now that I think about it, maybe this was all for the best.
B&W was just plain frustrating
Villagers need more food but theyd pop out sooo many babies that there was no chance of feeding them since you couldnt build enough farms cause there was never enough wood. The only way for population control was either to start chucking villagers into the ocean or by having them dance at the altar till they died. The villagers were not what I would call intelligent.
The creature itself was nothing more than a glorified Tamagotchi. Sure it did some cool things on occassion but it wasnt that bright either.
Dungeon Keeper was Moleynx's(spelling?) best game.
Hook up the B&W A.I. to Weta's Massive engine for an ORChestrated fight
"I am Heisenborg. You will probably be assimilated"
I hated B&W, but I might give this a shot...and it sounds neat to have them create their own languages...however, the MOMENT i hear one of the little guys spit out something like
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, i'm reformatting and selling my copy of the game =)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Perhaps they could sell ads in the game by having all the "hard guys" wear Viagra T-shirts to identify them.
If you don't understand anything I post, please accept that I ate paste as a small boy...
This must be the latest way to get free publicity. How many articles in the last few months said something to the effective of "IT's ALIVE!". Robots that have "learned" how to fly all by theirselves (yea right), game AI that is developing it's own language (yea right). Apparently it works, Slashdot falls for it everytime and publishes the story.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
i know shes might not be a full on nerd but try checking out asia carreras site. it was mentioned on here awhile for the um unreal contest i think anyways i definetly think a pornstar doesnt fall into the long haired electronic cave dwelling nerd stereotype...ahh then again it is just website development
Uh, would this qualify as funny if I was british? I get the Monty Python-esque humor but maybe this guy is too topical.
Wasn't the name of his next game supposed to be called "Black and White 2"? I didn't know he was working on some kind of system to compete with MegaHal. Clearly, this guy wants to make games and do AI research at the same time. Hence, all the attempts to integrate games with near cutting edge AI technology.
If I remember correctly, Black and White was originally supposed to have used actual neural networks as a learning model for the creatures. They couldn't get it to work well enough however in the time the had to get the game out. The use of Neural Nets for the creatures was what first caught my interest in the game. I thought "finally!". What I liked about the idea was the total unpredictability of the system. With a neural net, you really are teaching something in a very real sense. No heuristics or other tricks to make the creatures *seem* like they are learning.
Before the Patch, the game was so buggy that it was almost unplayable and nearly impossible to finish. Even after the patch I was unable to finish it (although I came very close). However, I loved the game. It was my first RTS game and I spent alot of time building houses and gathering food. Other fun included poisoning the food supplies of enemy villages and using the pack of wolves miracle. I'll look forward to whatever Peter has planned and I'll probably buy it when or if it is ever released.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
So this is how the Borg REALLY started.
Lionhead is all about hype. Black & White, while it was a good game, was nothing like they said it would be. Their claims were far too advanced. You will not be playing any game where characters make up their own language. The things the characters will do will be far short of what is explained in the article.
This would have been great for Quake 3 bots.
They are so ignorant. They never learn. You can't even teach them.
It would be nice if they could learn by example from the literally hudreds of thousands of patterns generated by all the real people playing the game.
--
I'm really stoned right now but I'm sure someone knows what I'm talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
this seems typically un borg-like. its more akin to a species evolving... that, is the future of AI.
Ah don't worry about it. We bought those guys out ages ago. If you look at a british person's ass close enough it says "Property: USA Lend Lease Program".
-1, Offtopic
"Waah waah waah, I'm not a loser, I excercise." Hey, if you weren't a loser, you wouldn't have replied.
Well, at least you posted your stupid comment as AC...
Learn to understand Ebonics?
This is not a racial thing, I'm just curious since new words are introduced rapidly (every Tuesday with the next album release) and though I prefer Eurodance and Trance, I find it difficult to converse with my hommies.
Tournament Management Online &
Today's PCs have the computing power of a small reptile, and don't have the ability to form neural connections except in simulation.
Also, typically, a huge chunk of a game's resources are devoted to audiovisual support.
Yet Lionhead in all it's greatness claims they found a way to accurately simulate a flock of intelligent creatures???
I have one word for this:
*goatse*
__
Not believing in force is like not believing in gravity.
...why their games take so bloody long to complete.
... if we could take this technology and implement it in some babel-fish-like translator that can interpret any known language to any other known language ?
it would. but it won't
It's a game folks. and like a game its designed to create fun content ( or in the case of lionhead any content ) and nothing else
If it was some great new technology the hype was clear , but when some AI programmer (no matter how talented he is) is saying it - I beg to differ. the creatures will probably have the same language capabilities as an insect (read about AI and find out for yourselves... 2 billion neurons in a neural net is a fit a bit hard to get right.. if at all).
So... it would be great if such game existed but alas it will be the military research or (just maybe) the academic research which finally deliver something close to human thinking in AI.
Not lionhead, even if they would like us to think so. sorry.
-1, redundant
Yes, the joke was funny probably about the first 10 times, when it popped up every now and then. It has ceased being funny, just like repeated mentions of Beowulf clusters, hot grits, all your base and "^H^H^H"
I fear that
"Which is better:
a) A Borg-like AI
OR...
b) Sex with a mare"
might suffer the same fate in the near future...
Okay, that introduction was pure genius.
If that isn't the true essence of human mentality, I don't know what is. </melancholy cynicism>
Okie.. only 3:45 am.. plenty of time for more Battlefield 1942 before sleep.. zzzz...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
This seems to me yet another attempt to play Life on a machine. Ala Matrix, if you'd rather put it in that context. As far as I can tell, there is no real gaming "concept" that has been show to me, or anyone else, that demonstrates how this "game" works, apart from the AI which, while impressive, will still boil down to how-much-can-be-done-without-slowing-down-to-nothi ng.
A lot of time is spent in the article with Evans talking about variuos social aspects of culture, what to do, what is expected, what is not expected. He brings up a Sims reference. That's about as close to gameplay as he comes to actually describing what it is Lionhead is attempting here. A larger scale Sims is just gonna look like a larger scale Sims, no matter how bad they too want to sell a billion copies.
The fact is that there is no true AI yet. No computer, machine, or created lifeform has yet to have hopes, dreams, or make decisions without having an entire list of them, somewhere, in which to choose from.
Here's a nice quote: "We can't have hundreds of agents looking at big decision trees all the time in real time while rendering the landscape, so we'll do a lot of off-line pre-computation of decision trees before the game starts," said Evans. "We're not sure just how much we can accomplish yet."
Again, as far as laying down gameplay dynamics, the most that can be learned from this article is that you'll play a member of society. Wow. Call me impressed. You'll have "good" actions, "naughty" actions (as Evans puts it), and "inbetween" actions in which the good and bad aren't clear. You'll have to fit into a "group" to survive (or at least that's how I took it), so be a sqaure or a thug, the fact remains: this still feels like someone trying to steal The Sims glory, and I wish them the best of luck.
If the best they can come up with is that characters fight with each other for status, and might come up with a few bits of code to mutter to one another to mean something unique to each of them, this looks like Nothing Special Just Yet.
Someone please mod parent up!
It's by far the best post I've seen all year!
The hype is being generated by you guys, not the folks at Lionhead.
"We're not sure just how much we can accomplish yet."
This was the last line in the article... who read it? They state what they are working on, what they've accomplished so far, and what they hope to be able to implement into the game. They ALSO state what I pasted above.
Anyone here ever played a game when you were young where on person would think up a phrase and whisper it into the ear of another, who would in turn whisper it into the ear of another so on and so forth? By the time the message got to the last person it was usually wildly different from what it started as. This game was there to teach a lesson most of slashdot does not understand. I've seen ten times as much hype created for this game in the postings here alone than I have seen anywhere else.
Read what is there... don't insert anything else.
Black & White was such a boring pointless game built ontop of a brilliant engine that it really pissed me off. They had better concentrate on making playable challenging and fun games, not wowing us with useless tricks like another dumb AI. I doubt our Athlon and P4 boxes are good enough to let any neural net evolve fast enough to do much of anything. Common most machines wont be able to run DOOM 3 well, how are we gonna run even a half way decent AI?
"Again?! Okay, I'll pretend to forget how to do it so Master can demonstrate it a few more times. Heheh. Then I'll do it and he'll feed me... Life is goooood!"
Anyone who trains animals sees that happen. It makes you think about the animal's motivational structure, and your own. It's encouraging that game designers are reaching the point where this is an issue for players.
MIT's Alpha Wolf and related projects explicitly go in this direction. A key issue here is that it's quite possible to have an useful emotional structure controlling behavior without much "thinking" or "planning". This is obvious to anyone who trains animals, but the AI community is just beginning to get it.
...I remember someone from Lionhead (probably the guy mentioned in the article) talking about the AI for the pets in B&W back when it was released. He mentioned that they were doing some tests and that he left his pet just standing there while he went off to do something else and forgot about it. When he came back later, the pet had gotten hungry, couldn't find any food, and proceeded to munch on it's own foot with no prompting or special coding from the programmer.
So I guess the obvious joke here is, will these new civilizations stoop to cannibalism if they aren't taken care of?
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
No its the Bishopbriggs Herald