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What Would You Like to See from Game AI?
jtogel asks: "As someone working in new (bio-inspired) AI research with an eye to applications in games, but within an academic setting, I often hear that game developers are not incorporating cutting-edge academic AI into their projects because it's too "risky" (they can't really predict how gamers would react), and because they don't see the point in it. As a gamer, and as someone who cares what gamers think, I am often surprised by the sorry state of current commercial game AI - it has hardly moved since the 1980s. However, maybe the problem is that no-one really knows what we want from game AI. Academics keep coming up with innovative AI technologies, but what we should we use it for? What do you think? What sort of intelligent behavior would you like to see in games, but don't at present? Which are the most obvious intelligence deficiencies of current NPCs that need to be fixed?"
Why can't the game AI learn routes, etc. from the player? One of my biggest gripes with bots is that they either only follow a (few) set pattern, as opposed to a player displaying (to the game) many other diverse routes and locations.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
> why can't there be games where we receive phone
> calls or e-mails from assassins in real life?
EA's Majestic.
Because the easy way to beat this sort of AI is generally to find a trick or three that works, then ram the tricks down the AI's throat. The latter takes a bit of practice, admittedly, but compared to the level of skill necessary to beat a dedicated human opponent, the level of skill to defeat even a pumped up and cheating AI is much lower.
What happens in Alpha Centauri is that as you pump up the AI's cheat factor, the only practical difference is that it affects the odds of AI stomping on me in the first hundred turns or not. Once I get established, the AI loses almost no matter what.
I strongly suspect that this is a general pattern; as you throw resources at a bad AI, it gets linearly stronger, but at least in a Civ game, the human is getting geometrically stronger as the game progresses. The game at high cheat levels becomes a matter of luck, not skill.
Moreover, it tends to limit the experiences the human can have, vs. the full range of what is possible. I know the AI will come at me with the screaming hordes in a single mass, because while it has resources, it can't do anything with them. I never get to experience setting up a proper, in-depth defense, because I only have to defend against the relatively small subset of the possible set of attacks that the computer knows how to launch, that sort of thing.
I agree with you at low human skill levels, but a better AI really should provide a better gaming experience for moderate skill levels and above.
Called off in a hurry after 19 participants in the game started taking things a little too seriously.
Um, have you played Oblivion yet? You can walk through towns, listen to people's converesations with each other, and start quests based on them...
Yeah, I as the original poster are an AI researcher (currently trying to do my PhD). I read a really nice book about AI in videogames, I would recommend it a lot to anyone interested in that, it is called (mm could not find the name, I promise to add the name of the book tomrrow as it is in my house). Anyways, the book explains the different AI techniques currently used in the different kinds of games, which currently are very standard searching techniques.
AI that learns. I am so sick of AI not keeping a log of encounters. There are many learning algorithms out there and none of them apply to full emersion games
Sure, there is enough AI development for that, take fore example genetic algorithms for evolution, the concept is not hard at all and surely will improve NPC behaviour a lot.
As for the risk for development houses in using CSc.-AI sure it is, that is why it will be a startup company with nothing to lose the one that will use the new approach.
One of my current projects is using the RPG toolkit to create a world with only NPC characters, I am still thinking the idea but I plan to implement plenty of AI concepts in the "game". For example, using JADE & JadeX for the NPCs, and use some of my research (about uncertainty management) too. Of course I will add genetic algorithms and neural networks.
The idea is to throw as much AI I can. The graphics will be very simple but I will concentrate on the AI.
Oh! one of the problems of using classical AI concepts is the processing time constraints, however there have also been advances in that direction as research in "Real Time" solutions is being done too (look at www.scopus.com)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I worked on the "Age of" games through Mythology, though not on the AI, and perhaps I can shed some light on what you were seeing. I know much less about the system used in Mythology, so things that were true for Age1 and Age2 may not be so for it.
In each of those games, there were actually multiple 'AI systems' that comprised the "AI". This allowed for separation of short term goals from long term strategy and computer player personality, as well as for exploration, expansion and reaction to events such as being attacked.
In all of the Age games, AI players could be put on your team as allies, or grouped in teams against other teams of AI players. You could reveal the map, and sit back and watch them duke it out against each other.
The AI players always had an advantage over humans in terms of issuing order to units. In one 1/20 of a second turn, it could locate every unit that was idle, determine a task for it, and issue the task command.
The AI players 'Age of' games I worked on did not ever cheat by creating resources out of thin air or get different gathering or building speeds. You could starve a computer opponent out of a resource. On the Harderst difficulty level, all AI players would get bonus resources at the start of the game (and possibly at the start of each age).
Multiple AI players would work together in various ways; coordinating attacks, trading with each other, and even acting as a 'feeder' player.. going all economy and then tributing other AI players to boost them up quickly.
In Age of Empires 1 & 2, the AI players did not look at your list of units of and buildings to determine what you had, where you were, and how to counter it. Same for the locations of resources. An AI Player had to see it first, before it was allowed to 'know' about and act on it. In the other big RTS games, this is defiantly not true as they just look at the global object list. For this reason, the 'Age of' AI sent out units specifically to scout the world map. Once noticed, the info would be shared with allied AI players.
You could exploit this: if you were on an island, and never let any units go close enough to the water to be seen by AI ships, the AI players would never send any units to attack you, as it did not 'know' where any of your stuff was. Another way was to build in an area that the AI's had previously explored but were unlikely to wander back into. The line-of-sight distances in Age2 were increased to help keep this from handicapping the AI's too badly.
One area where 'cheating' was necessary was path finding. If you took a unit, and told it to move to an unexplored location, a valid path would have to be computed, requiring that it know about unexplored obstacles. This could be exploited in some ways. If a wonder was surrounded by walls, yet there was hidden break in the wall somewhere, just pathing a unit from outside to the wonder, would make the unit take the break, even if it was in an unexplored area as it was moving along a validly computed path.
I felt that we put much, *much* more work into making the 'Age of' AI's not cheat than most RTS games. What I learned from that though was that the public usually notice enough to care. A non cheating, general purpose AI often will not seem as 'intelligent' as an AI that cheats and has highly scripted or triggered events. The upside is that it allows the AI to play reasonably well on randomly generated maps; something most RTS games don't even bother to try.