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IEEE Spectrum Surveys Current Games' AI Technology
orac2 writes " IEEE Spectrum has an article on the AI technologies used in the current crop of video games. State machines, learning algorithms, cheating, smart terrain, etc are discussed. Game developers interviewed include Richard Evans, of Black and White fame, who talks about Lionhead's upcoming Dmitri project and Soren Johnson who created Civ III's AI."
The page located at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ai.html#search contains wonderful links about coding A.I. into your games, programs, etc.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
link
You think it's hard to play with a dial up connection? Try sattilite sometime (*dodge*, *dodge*, *fire*... 3 seconds pass... "Wow, I missed... imagine that!").
I'd really like to see a decent AI for games like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. The henchman have roughly the IQ of a very dumb dog. On more than one occasion, I've had a henchman walk directly into a fireball on the basis that an opponent was nearby. Mmm... toasty.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
but I find that the AI in Hitman II is quite exceptional. I havn't seen AI this good since Turok2 Dinosaur hunter!
Supposedly both D3 and Q4 will be shifting the focus back to single-player (great news for narrowband nerds like myself). But then again neither will mark a vast improvement in AI.
:(
id's focus is on graphics and physics (game engines) not providing strong heuristic bots (resource intensive entities)
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
in its infancy. It's scope is restricted. It can never be a "jack of all trades". AI, to a large level, still seems to be hardcoded. But soon, I guess you have an AI module, to which a physical model is assigned, and then it is "trained". That module could be taught how to drive a car, or how to duck and shoot, or BOTH.
Anyways, coming to the topic of AI and entertainment, if u have visited the LOTR - TTT site, you'll see an interactive MASSIVE system. Imagine making a few entities interact, waiting for the sequence to render and then view the final movie that has been created....
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
Now, why do assume it is even possible to have an "AI life form"? One problem of many is that things that are alive (alive like animals are alive, not like plants are alive) are indeterministic (they do what they want to (free will)), and computers are deterministic. And why do you assume it would be equivalent to a person? Fleas are definitely alive, but they have exactly NO rights.
Tim
I've just been reading Steve Rabin's book, AI Game Programming Wisdom, mentioned briefly in the article. I'm not a game programmer, but I am a programmer, and I've always been curious about game AIs. And I have to say that the book is very good, well worth it if you have any interest in the topic. It's actually a collection of articles written by a bunch of game AI programmers, collected and edited by Rabin. It covers a lot of ground, explains approaches that have worked and approaches that have failed, and why (in both cases). It contains both useful general principles and interesting examples of specific cases.
I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to a novice programmer, but for a moderately experienced programmer who's interested in practical game AI design, this book is well worth a look. The name says it all, this is a book written by the folks in the trenches, passing along their hard-earned wisdom. Very enjoyable.
Now I want to try my own hand at writing some game AI. Maybe I should poke around on sourceforge for games that need AI help. (Assuming I can weed my way past all the projects that have NO CODE AT ALL, which seems to be especially common with the games on sourceforge.)
This is the ghost in the machine myth. Many believe that human intelligence is somehow "special" in a way that mechanical devices can't be, as if the brain were made of more than mere matter that follows predictable laws of physics. It's a common view. I would wager that >90% of the population believes it. Virtually every religion embraces and teaches it, either explicitly or implicitly. People want to believe that their identity is somehow transcendent to the universe.
We've seen this before with vitalism: people used to be convinced that living matter was somehow "special" and different than non-living matter in a fundamental way that dips below physics. Now we know that organic life is just a special arrangement of atoms that allows those atoms to be self-replicating.
Obviously, a living cell is a particulary complex arrangements of atoms. The difference between the animate and the inanimate is huge: we relate to grizzly bears much differently than we do to a pile of rocks. Prehaps this is why our intuition is so misinformed... it's not representationally meaningful to think of a grizzly bear as being composed of dirt, air, and water, even though it is.
The same thing applies to intelligence. We have every indication that brains cause minds. We've mapped which areas of the brain correspond to which areas of functionality. Emotions can be altered predictably with drugs. Every aspect of a near death experiences (NDE) can be triggered with chemicals, sensory deprivation (IIRC), a sharp blow to the head, or something mundane and physical. Ultimately, the experience known as self and the sensation of free will boil down to being just a special set of computations that can run on any Turing Machine or x86 with enough memory.
Of course, the complexity difference b/t you and an Unreal bot is several orders of magnitude. It's not representationally meaningful for me to think of you as the same thing... there's just not as much satisfaction in fragging a bot. :-)
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
C'mon, thought experiments are the stuff that philosophy is made of. You give me a scientific, measurable definition of conciousness and I'll lay off the thought experiments.
:)
When it comes to building circuits that act like neurons, I'm not a neuromorphic engineer. But even today people are building circuits that can interface with neurons (look at the guys at Cal Tech, for example). There was that guy in Britian (can't remember his name, references somebody?) who was doing experiments with re-routing electrical signals from his arm to his computer and back to his arm to see if the computer could reproduce the signal adequately to control the muscle (this was the same guy who walked around with implants that tracked where he was around the school).
If it makes you feel better you can skip the step about "synthetic" neurons and go right to the step where you've got a little computer that simulates the neurons and can interface with them.
As for simulating the brain exactly: first of all, there isn't much evidence that there is any quantum effects in the behavior of a neuron (people don't seem to take Roger Penrose too seriously in this area). Second of all, even if there are quantum effects and there was some randomness to the simulation, so what? Just because there are quantum effects, doesn't mean you can't simulate them. You aren't trying to *predict* what someone else's brain is going to do, you just want a simulation that follows the same laws. You just have to add some randomness to your experiment.
What makes a neuron a neuron is that it is, well, a neuron.
Can't argue with you there.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?