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AI Researchers Produce New Kind of PC Game

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the learning-by-killing dept.

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."

7 of 342 comments (clear)

  1. What is old is new again by jockm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    What do you know I wrote a novel
  2. Greetings, Professor Falken. by infonography · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
  3. Sounds like "Galapagos" by metamatic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.

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    GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
  4. Re:begin? by Surt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Diablo II, I'm Doug M.

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    "Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
  5. Re:If it's fun... by bratboy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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

  6. Re:Or perhaps... by PsiPsiStar · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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    It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
  7. Re:Coral Cache by TCM · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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>

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    Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6