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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=-
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.
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?
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.
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....
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...
"Characters even have the ability to dynamically create their own language, constructing simple sentences on a word by word basis."
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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
...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 ##
And poor commenting.
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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)
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!
Uh, would this qualify as funny if I was british? I get the Monty Python-esque humor but maybe this guy is too topical.
Ugh. I have, and it's been a waste of time. While there are many things that are cool, they're poor substitutes of interface (gestures -- cool, but ultimately frustrating for me) and A.I. (it's easier to teach a goldfish to dance than to teach these critters anything). In the end, it feels more like work to me to find "fun" in the game.
On the other hand, I swear the critters are TEACHING ME to do all the hard work managing the villagers, while pretending to be learning from me.
"Oooh... Master wants me to water the grains, and put grain into granary. Fine, I'll do it once."
"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!"
This says nothing, just Your Mileage May Vary, and I'm glad you liked it -- because I knew a lot of people who don't.
Why do you assume that these physical accomplishments (impressive, certainly) remove you from the category of loser? In my opinion, if you're happy with yourself and have productive relationships with other people, then not much else matters.
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.
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.
"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.