Slashdot Mirror
Keep Playing With AI
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports
how a newly developed AI system 'learns' your playing behavior and can even play for you when its time to take out the garbage or do other non-essential things around the house. My only question is if it could even learn to bs for me on those laggy starcraft 3v3 games."
I would prefer that the AI took out the garbage so that *I* can continue playing my game ;-)
Besides which, who wants to give up their game for "someone" else to play. I mean it would be bad enough coming back from running an errand and finding that your sibling/gf/friend has died and put you back to the start let alone your friend. Or even that they've managed to get you past the point you've been banging your head against for ages so that now you feel cheated at not having achieved the goal yourself.
Nope, I think the "pause" button is not going to be replaced by an AI any time soon.
A little planning goes a long way...
Then I want it to play the best strategy, not do the same stupid stuff I do wrong...
Imagine all the lonely AI cyber-sex sessions that will happen in this world...
Seriously, though, there has to be a line drawn here. Sure, it'll be good for parents to get the kids off the machine for dinner, but won't it eventually lead to being an all-AI game? Isn't the point of big games, like MMORPGs to be that the people with no life and play 800 hours a week to have better characters than the casual gamer? With this system, you teach the AI to practice blacksmithing, let it run day and night for a few days, and come back with a master blacksmith. Just seems like you are taking out the challenge of the game...
For the record, I don't play MMORPGs.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I don't think you want spend all that gold on that that Palladin shield. Maybe you should relax a bit and think it over.
The company has developed an artificial intelligence system that learns a gamer's style of play and can take over and play for them if they have to spend time away from the game.
So If i'm not very good at a game the ai wont be either? Even so this could be exploitable and used to be better at a game than a friend, we all remeber zbot from quake2.
He said many players of online games become frustrated because their lifestyle limited their interaction with a game world.
but in a stragagy game you can run when nature calls and be mostly ok
Typically they involve creating lots of slightly different solutions to a problem, testing to see which perform best and then taking and randomly mutating these to produce a new batch that are again tested, mutated and so on.
They should focus this advanced AI on the computer players of the game not into an autopilot mode.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
Ok, I'm no hard-core gamer but personally, I can't think of anything worse than AI making guesses about what my strategy is and what I'm planning and thinking of doing.
So the question is, what's the point? If "real life" intruides on my gaming, I simply hit pause and come back to it later.
It just seems to me like one of those things that'll make people go "wow!" for the first couple of minutes and then never use again.
In other words, a bit pointless, especially if you could have been spending that development time doing something more worthwhile (like adding depth to a game, improving other AI, adding extra levels, better documentation etc. etc.)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
My only question is if it could even learn to bs for me on those laggy starcraft 3v3 games.
I don't know about bsing but maybe if you hooked up a mechanical system to your serial port and ethernet cable, it would learn how to pull the cable out of the wall just before the end of your starcraft games.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Actually, at one point there was a game based in part on the ability to be disconnected and return called NetStorm. I actually liked it quite a bit (was a beta tester and bought it when it came out) but it ended up selling a very small number of copies and all the players on the server were using hacked clients by day two of the actual release.
Anyway, the game would fight on while you were gone, which was possible because the pieces were stationary cannons and the like, so when you came back you probably were a bit behind, but not wiped out. I won a few times after a reconnect, so the idea worked.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I agree the server should be watching the player. How better to take notes on how to improve the gaming experience? But don't use it to play the game FOR the player when the player's bored with the game. FIX THE GAME.
If you've designed your game with lots of boring repetitious stuff which is well-suited for a machine, then you've gone the wrong direction.
If your idea of making certain events rare is a spawn-rate measured in hours or days, then you've gone the wrong direction.
If you think of your paying customers as gerbils who will do anything, especially hitting the spacebar or attack key every ten seconds, for eight hours at a stretch, then you've gone the wrong direction.
Instead, if you want to keep your player's interests, offer more entertainment that works within their available time. Make the player's time in the game more valuable. Make it possible to play a little over lunch, a little on Thursday evening, and still feel accomplishment.
For starters, employ adaptive spawning instead of location-based spawning. If the server notices a party of adventurers who haven't fought anything in a while, decide approximately how tough an encounter should be, then let it descend upon them. Vary the toughness, vary the approaches, vary the circumstances which trigger a spawn. Don't count server time to the next spawn, count character time to their next adventure opportunity. If the game isn't focused on hunting and leveling to the exclusion of all else (hah, yeah, like THAT will ever happen in THIS industry), then watch the players' behavior to decide what kinds of quests the player likes. Ration those out at a rate that keeps them interested, in character-time, not server-time. If the player plays twice a week, give them the stuff they like each time they log in. If the player really does enjoy slashing for hours on end, then give them a little surprise every now and then.
Massive multiplayer games should take advantage of the massive multiplayer-ness. Like, duh. The statistical analysis which could be done on player behavior in MMORPGs is staggering. The fact that game designers just don't bother doing it or using it, is mind boggling beyond the extreme. The fact that today's MMORPGs are essentially single-player games with thousands of human-powered NPCs just makes me wonder whether anyone really gets it.
[
"The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. "
An now we have AI's to play tedious computer games for us!
I thought this would be a great way for children to practice the game. Seemed very "Diamond Agey" to me.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I have developed an AI that will make your Slashdot posts for you. It just pastes big quotes from the article and throws in a few off-topic references to the DMCA.
- Have a picture
I'm always suspicious of how "AI"'s (actually not AI, computer player) "learn"ing your play is actually implemented in computer games. In my experience, the computer opponents just run around in circles, launching attacks that consist of merely pushing units toward the player, and only succeeding if the CP's resources outnumber the human's. If they are doing some kind of learning, it's non-obvious to the observer.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!