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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."
And I still have trouble beating some games that are a decade old.
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
I always win.
**unplugs computer**
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence any day!
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
I have a 56k modem, and no chance of getting broadband, so while massive online fragfests might seem like fun, they're not really accessible to me (RTCW was bearable till PunkBuster slowed it to shit).
Unfortunately, the games industry seems to have focused on turning out hundreds of online fragfest games that bring in the $$ but leave little to the imagination. Even 'The Sims' are at it.
AI doesn't necessarily have to be 100% realistic for a rewarding offline game. But even the bots in UT2003 aren't that hot, so it's clear AI and single player games are taking a backseat to the online money spinners.
Hopefully some big breakthroughs in AI will turn the tide, but with the games industry already ignoring AI, I'm not optimistic for AI's future in games.. since everyone would rather play their dumb neighbor anyway.
mogorific carpentry experiments
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.
Not until a bot calls me a "c4mp1ng n00b" by its own volition has AI come far enough.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Namely, what happens if some researched finally stumbles across an application that passes the Turing test? One that for all intents and purposes appears to be a conscious life form?
The resulting ethical problems will be myriad:
- Will the AI life form be the property of the person or corporation that developed it?
- Will the AI life form be copyrightable?
- Will the creator of the AI life form be obligated to keep it "alive" (i.e. keep the power running, etc.) as long as possible?
- Will the AI life form have the same rights as an ordinary human being?
- Will distributing the souce code for the AI life form be regulated under anti-cloning statutes?
- Will the AI life form be allowed to earn money as a result of its efforts in controlling entities in videogames?
- Will the AI life form be entitled to royalties as a participant in the creator of the videogame?
As a libertarian I am torn between my concerns about keeping markets free and unregulated, and my concerns for the freedoms and rights of potential AI life forms. Interesting times...QUOTE: For a project code-named Dmitri, Evans is now focused on improving the ability of AI to interact socially. Agents' behavior will be controlled by their membership in overlapping social groups.
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So how long until the AI gets good enough that we don't need it to be truly multiplayer and can all play on our local machines with AI characters that can chat with us about our real lives instead of just the game?
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I have yet to find an FPS where I felt the bots had really believable AI.
In most FPS games, the bots simply have really good "aim" and really good "dodging ability" in the higher difficulty levels, coupled with the fact that the computer technically knows where you are all the time. Even so, a player will usually develop reflexes that will allow them to outgun the bots.
Players without the "reflexes" to beat the bots' super aim can still beat them, as the bots will repeatedly fall for the same tricks over and over.
To have realistic bots, they need to be able to learn from their mistakes. Bots fail to learn things such as the following:
1) The player's favorite weapons.
A common technique in games like Quake is to "control" the weapons. If you are playing against someone who is great with the rocket launcher, but not so hot with the other weapons, you can try to limit their access to that weapon. Bots don't pick up that you use the RL all the time, and thus don't really do a great job of stopping you from getting it.
2) The player's techniques.
Obviously, if a player likes to re-use certain techniques (circle strafing, etc.) too much, other players will pick up on it. Bots, however, don't really anticipate what the player might do in this fashion.
3) Mistakes.
At the same time, the bots will often reuse the same techniques as well. However, the human player will pick up on it. Bots need to learn what tactics it has used that have failed, and try something else.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Given that this is the IEEE, it was somewhat disappointing to read the following.
Fortunately, most graphics processing had by then moved onto dedicated graphics cards, and CPU resources and memory--already increasing dramatically, thanks to Moore's law--were being freed up for computationally intensive and hitherto impractical tasks, such as better AI.
They make Moore's Law sound as if it is something more than just an observation.
places limitations on algebraic systems. One of the things that it does *not* do is place limits on understanding because it imposes no limits on * the number of algebraic systems* you can devise.
If a theorem cannot be expressed in one system you simply make another where it can.
One of the fascinating things about the human mind is its ability to go *beyond* single logical structures and fully understand an infinite number of incompatible algebras.
The problem with developing AI isn't so much that we don't understand the human mind, it's that we *do* understand it to be something well beyond a simple algebraic computer, which at the moment is all computers are. They are *computational* devices with a preprogramed logic. *That* logic is subject to Godel.
Your computer is a giant abacus. Nothing more, nothing less. This says nothing about the possibilities of developing machines that are *not* simply a bank of bistable switches.
Nor is there any axiom which states that intelligence must be *human* in form.
That last point is outrageously important to all sorts of fields.
KFG
> Naturally, the AI has the shortest time frame in the software engineering, but there is no reason it should remain stagnent across the future patches.
Another problem is that lots of games are just engines that support an 'official' dataset plus whatever modpacks the players care to come up with, but even the cheatAI that ships with the game won't work worth a damn on the modpacks.
I hope in the future machine learning methods can help with both of these problems. I.e., a couple of months before release when the code is fairly stable and the graphics are in production, turn on the old Beowulf cluster and let reinforcement learning or an evolutionary algorithm train a good AI for the game. As for modpacks, the vendors could support something like sourceforge, where gamers could upload their modpacks and have the Beowulf cluster automagically re-tune the AI to work right with them.
And of course, the machine learning could continue in the background for as long as people were interested in the game, allowing them to download "new improved" AIs every few months.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Not long before Lara Croft rejects me like a real woman would.
Table-ized A.I.
AI is a euphemism for "behavior." When I hear people complaining about how games aren't using the latest in AI research, I want to respond "that's because games don't really use AI" at least not what people think of as AI. AI in a typical game is just a list of weighted rules, such as "if the player has a more powerful weapon than character X, make character X run away." When you have lots of such rules and you twiddle with them a lot, then you get so-called AI.
Putting in random factors makes things much harder to pin down. Maybe when a character spots you, there will be a 50% "run or attack" decision. If the decision to run, then you think "Ha, ha, ha, he's running scared!" If the decision is to attack, and he gets you, then you think "Wow, that guy was good." If he attacks and you get him, then you feel like you're doing well.
To a great extent AI is psychological. You read into things what you want.
Some time after getting Unreal Tournament 2003, I set out to appraise its AI. I decided to set up a game in which it couldn't cheat; I made a one-on-one game, on the map DM-Gael (a small, open map, so while the bot may always know the player's location, also vise versa), and with rocket launchers only (so that the bot couldn't do some simple trig to always hit). I set the bot to its highest difficulty, and played.
The bot had some notable weaknesses (it kept getting killed going for the powerup in the center, or while coming up a lift, and never seemed to learn from these mistakes), but did fairly well overall. In the end I won with a substantial, but not overwhelming, margin.
So, I said, the AI had failed the test: given a fair match, on its most difficult settings, it lost. But then I realized, I had a lot of fun administering it. Then I realized that the point of an AI isn't to beat the player, but to be fun to play against; whether it wins or loses really doesn't matter.
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.)