AI Researchers Produce New Kind of PC Game

Ken Stanley writes "In an unusual demonstration of video game innovation with limited funding and resources, a mostly volunteer team of over 30 student programmers, artists, and researchers at the University of Texas at Austin has produced a new game genre in which the player interacively trains robotic soldiers for combat. Unlike most games today that use scripting for the AI, non-player-characters in NERO learn new tactics in real-time using advanced machine learning techniques. Perhaps projects such as this one will encourage the video game industry to begin to seek alternatives to simple scripted AI."

Comments

What is old is new again

[jockm]

One of the earliest forms of AI I ever learned about was MENACE. A pre-computer means of training a system to play and win Tic-Tac-Toe. I will confess to loosing more than a little time "training" my system.

Greetings, Professor Falken.

[infonography]

Joshua: Greetings, Professor Falken.
Stephen Falken: Hello, Joshua.
Joshua: A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?

For those of you who actually look on a user's history of posts, yes this is a variant of another post I did, however it's apropos here as well.

Sounds like "Galapagos"

[metamatic]

"Galapagos" by Anark had a robot creature with some kind of neural net, and you had to teach him to navigate around by providing him with appropriate stimuli and rewards.

It could get frustrating--sometimes if he hit a particular deadly obstacle too often, he'd become traumatized, and would then refuse to go anywhere near it, which could make the level impossible until you had allowed him to wander around and petted him and calmed him down.

Great game, though. I wish there were more like it.

Re:begin?

[Surt]

Diablo II, I'm Doug M.

Re:If it's fun...

[bratboy]

as an ex-game programmer, i can tell you that developing AI is hard mostly because you don't want the game to be too hard. developing AI which will always win is easy. in this case it's a somewhat specialized "core wars"-style genre, but in most games (in which AI interacts with players) overly potent AI is more of an issue.

and then there's the fun factor. i seem to remember an article about one of the Id games in which they developed all sorts of interesting behaviors for the AIs, played with in for a while, and eventually came to the conclusion that "turn and move toward player" gave much better gameplay.

on a separate note, i remember a game from the late 80's in which you had to program logic circuits to get a robot to perform tasks of increasing difficulty... not a game with a lot of commercial appeal, i'm sure, but i spent many hours trying to solve problems using those little graphical circuit boards...

daniel

Re:Or perhaps...

[PsiPsiStar]

http://www.poconorecord.com/report/iraqwar/000092. htm

Re:can they learn suicide runs?

[jtogel]

As for what you call "ethical cheats", that is what evolutionary algorithms are really, really good at. Trust me. You have design your fitness function (scoring system) very carefully for this not to happen. It is a major source of frustration, disappointment and thoughts of getting a normal job among neuroevolution researchers. E.g., you want evolution to come up with a nice neural network that drives smoothly around a track, but evolution (that bastard!) finds out that it can actually score higher faster by creating something that drives in circles, bounces between walls etc.

I don't know about the other tactics, but it is certainly not impossible, given that NEAT is more open-ended that most NE systems out there. Let's find out!

Re:Coral Cache

[TCM]

What has become of simple HTTP downloads with relative paths? The whole binary could have been picked up by Coral. But nooooo, it has to be a fancy "download.php" with a parameter "go=yes"?! WTF? Is everyone growing retarded these days?

</rant>

pac-man with emotion-like behavior

[0111 1110]

Does anyone remember a research 'game' which was sort of like Pacman but with real motivation. IIRC, the Pacman character was programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Certain pellets were considered positive reinforcements and others were considered negative reinforcements. It ended up having some almost spooky emergent behavior, like hiding in a corner if there were too many negative reinforcement pellets. It seemed to develop responses almost like fear. Stuff like that. I can't recall the details unfortunately. I think it was done as a university project or something, maybe in the late 80s. The idea of generating unpredictable emergent behavior from a relatively simple computer program has stayed with me.

I think that will be the next stage of computer characters: to make them unpredictable even for the programmers. Rule-based learning can get you somewhat complex behavior, but it is all predictable. What we need is genuine example-based learning. So that the resulting behavior would be impossible for anyone to predict and constantly changing and evolving. Of course I am thinking along the lines of various neural network, connectionist architectures. Their unpredictability is generally considered a downside, but for a game the black box aspect seems perfect.