Mutating Animations

Weird_one writes "Discover magazine's current issue has an intriguing article involving using genetic algorithims to evolve an animation of a walking individual."

Comments

Re:Just wait for the game with this feature...

[arvindn]

I'll assume that you're referring to the game adjusting to your playing style, because there are no real-time CPU constraints if you just want to evolve a generic entity. If that's the case, the more serious problem would probably be getting sufficient user input. Genetic algos usually take hundreds, sometimes thousands of generations, and since you cant wait for the user to play the game thousands of times you've got to improvise.

In the case of board games, we've had learning algorithms for a long time now. I remember Fritz4 (chess program) having it 6-7 years ago.

Re:Just wait for the game with this feature...

[mr3038]

Download the E3 demo of Half-Life 2. In it there is a section where people are fighting alongside Gordon. This didn't look too spectacular until the presenter announced that these characters were NOT moving according to a script.

Call me a skeptic, but I don't swallow that immediately. When Black and White was still in production there was some press that stated that the game had such a great AI that if the developers dropped a ball to the citizens, they started to play soccer by their own, assisted by the AI only. Did anybody ever see anything even remotely near that level of intelligence in the final release?

Yes, that scene could really use AI to move all the characters but it remains to be seen if the scene is constructed specially so that AI can survive on its own or was the AI really intelligent? Don't expect too much. It's AI instead of I for a reason.