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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."
Slashdotted before it even went live. Here is a working link. Downloads are currently at 511, I hope their counter has more than 9 bits...
If this technique provides for fun gameplay, or more importantly, a notable difference in the experience, then sure, it might become more common.
Keep in mind though - entertainment is meant to be entertaining, not neccesarily realistic or academically advanced.
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Get back to me when my brain starts working.
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.
What do you know I wrote a novel
This is a neat concept, with or without the "neuroevolution" approach (evolving artificial neural networks with genetic algorithms). Including human brains in the training loop for algorithm development is key. The reason so many AI algorithms have found limited application in fielded physical systems (such as weapon systems) is because the competing approach--dozens of smart engineers, working long hours, tweaking human-readable algorithm code and Monte Carlo simulating the tweaked designs over and over for years--is so effective.
The DOD will get interested, and use a similar technique to train -real- robots?
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
This isn't entirely a new idea. CROBOTS, for example, put one in the position of designing AIs that control tanks and then pits them against one another in an arena.
Oh hell, you know this will taken over by /.'ers AND do /.'ers know a damn thing about soldiering?
Probably not, but beware -- you may just create a robotic system administrator/repairman. Don't put yourselves out of a job!!!
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
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.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
> Perhaps projects such as this one will encourage the video game
> industry to begin to seek alternatives to simple scripted AI.
hopefully it will encourage the video game industry to begin seeking alternatives to Yet Another High Resolution First Person Shooter.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of trained anonymous cowards imagining a beowolf cluster of these....
Maybe, after all, such a cluster exists because there is such a post on everything remotely clusterable.
"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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If it's UT anywhere but Austin, you say where.
If it's UT and it's anything but Unreal Tournament, you say what it is.
Only for the purposes of helping distribution, and for a limited time, torrent available at nerogame.exe.torrent
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
Is it fun to play?
The problem with expensive investments in AI is that the publisher must have a series of successful games built on the fruits of that labor before there is any profit. This could possibly be mitigated somewhat by licensing this engine for use by other companies, but this is also weighed by the fact that your competitors are now using the same or similar types of advanced artificial intelligence in their games which may hurt sales of your own games. Large publishers, such as EA and Microsoft, have the resources and wherewithal to make these long term bets, but the smaller boutique firms have neither the willingness nor the ability to finance the development of these types of advanced engines in house. It may be useful to look at some numbers from 2004, courteously compiled by the http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blog/2005/02/24/" >shrapnelgames blog.
The total revenue for the game industry in 2004 was 1.2 billion dollars which was down 100 million from 2003. During this same period only two games had sales of over 500,000 units, but there were 18 games which had sales of 250,000 or more. Based upon the varying definitions of what constitutes a "new release" there were roughly 1,100 games released in 2004 of which maybe 6% earned a profit. The average budget for a competitive game is said to be around two million dollars with an average break even point of around 110,000 units sold. The average retail game price is $24.45 with only 5,000 total units sold.
Clearly, the open source community is willing to undertake these efforts on their own initiative or for other reasons related to research, as was the case with the student produced game. I am in no way denigrating the efforts of these students, what they produced with the resources available to them was simply amazing and of surprising quality. However, in the world of retail games it takes a certain amount of marketing, advertising, and Wal-Mart end caps to rise above the background noise, unless you are like the aforementioned established game companies and the reputation speaks for itself, at least until they release a real stinker. At the end of the day, when all things are factored in, there is simply not enough money in the budget of the average game to make this type of advanced artificial intelligence worth the risk and expense, at least right now. However, if there is any constant in the game industry it is change and this will probably change in the years to come. I would like to see some new and innovative games too, instead of Madden 2017, but it looks like we will have to wait a while yet.
..and he says that's what the Marines are. But really, the DoD does fund a lot of machine learning; however, the current state of the art only allows machine to solve specific problems. You need a traning metric, etc. and that's not trivial.
False.
FLOPs are not generally useful for things like scripted AI which are very branch heavy with a lot of indirection, and many possible branch targets and data requirements.
The techniques described in this game are highly mathematical in nature with a small memory foot-print, (adaptive neural networks and genetic programming via Kenneth Stanley's NEAT algorithm) and would benefit hugely from parallel vector proccessing.
Additionally, at the end of the day, the AI decision making is not nearly as expensive as the proximity-query and pathfinding routines that affect the decisions. These routines also benefit hugely from vector processors and high bus-bandwidth.
So fittingly, the AI will only suffer if the human intelligence can't adapt and make the fairly obvious decision to move toward more mathematical AI routines.
Diablo II, I'm Doug M.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I'd like to know if the NEROs can evolve more advanced tactics such as:
When its health is less than 5% and likely to die, make a final kamakaze run at a tough enemy to deliver a mega bomb, draw fire, etc...
Gang beat downs - Even though the NERO is closer to enemy tank B, focus your fire on enemy tank A since its damage is critical and about to be pushed over the edge.
Unload power ups - Before picking up a weapons upgrade that would replace my super grenade, go ahead and lob all of my super grenades before picking up the power-up.
Waiting for power ups to cycle - In some games, a power-up changes every few seconds. Could the NEROs learn to wait for spread-fire on one level versus lazer fire on another level? Okay, levels is too easy, how about depending on the situation, what my friends have, etc...
And most importantly, could NERO's be taught to perform "ethical cheats"? By ethical cheat, I mean take advantage of the game engine or environment in a way not intended by the developers. -Not by patching code or using network sniff bots.
Sure, these seem like pretty simple tactics, but YOU try programming this kind of AI. It's next to impossible!
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
So look me up in the credits already!
If you can suggest how better to prove that I worked on it, let me know.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
That kind of game may have a very sizeable market. My girlfriend seems to enjoy a game in which she turns me on and then leaves the room... heh heh... girlfriend... I almost kept a straight face...
Will these things be marketable? "Ma, I'm not playing games, I'm training my robo-warrior!"