Chip Promises AI Performance in Games

Heartless Gamer writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a dedicated processor for AI performance in games. The product, from a company called AIseek, seeks to do for NPC performance what the PhysX processor does for in-game physics. From the article: "AIseek will offer an SDK for developers that will enable their titles to take advantage of the Intia AI accelerator. According to the company, Intia works by accelerating low-level AI tasks up to 200 times compared to a CPU doing the work on its own. With the acceleration, NPCs will be better at tasks like terrain analysis, line-of-sight sensory simulation, path finding, and even simple movement. In fact, AIseek guarantees that with its coprocessor NPCs will always be able to find the optimal path in any title using the processor." Is this the 'way of the future' for PC titles? Will games powered by specific pieces of hardware become the norm?

Comments

hm

[JeanBaptiste]

sounds like it just speeds up existing AI routines..... and existing AI routines, well, SUCK.

I dont think we are going to get any good AI until it has some method of "learning"

Re:hm

[Da Fokka]

sounds like it just speeds up existing AI routines..... and existing AI routines, well, SUCK.

That's largely because most CPU cycles go to the pretty graphics. More computing power might help the AI in some games (although many AI routines are basically flawed anyway). This chip offers a more powerful tool to the AI programmer. It's still up to him to make an AI that's not totally stupid.

Not Gonna Work

[TychoCelchuuu]

The physics card could theoretically work because if the player doesn't have it, you could always leave out some of the eye candy and only calculate fancy physics for objects that affect gameplay. With an AI card, you don't have that luxury. Either they player has it, or you have to just dump all the AI (obviously not) or do it all on the CPU, which begs the question: why program your game for a dedicated AI card if you're just going to have to make it work on computers without one?

Re:Not Gonna Work

[MBGMorden]

The flip side though, is that if most AI's could really think well, almost no human could compete with them in a game. You'd loose almost every time.

Re:Not Gonna Work

[izomiac]

Computing possible outcomes is only one of the strategies humans use to make a decision. For chess that may be enough for a decently human-acting AI. But for most games such an AI would either be terrible or impossible to beat (at which point it would be programmed to make mistakes thus go back to being terrible). Throwing more processing power at the problem won't fix it, though it might make the AI slightly better. What's really needed is a better approach to creating AIs.

A learning neural network would be an interesting solution, but has a few problems that make it undesirable IMHO. First, it would start out really bad (when it knew nothing). Now, that could be fixed by training it beforehand, but then you'd run into the second problem faster. The second problem would be that it would soon get to be too good to really be fun for most people. (Hardcore players would probably love it, since they seem to only really care about winning and not about playing, IMHO, but perhaps those are just the ones I've encountered.) You could artifically slow down its learning, but then it wouldn't have much of an advantage over a preprogrammed AI. Third, the AI could progress in an unexpected direction which would of course lead to unusual behaviors. (Like if it found a way to instantly kill the player on sight 100% of the time, or it started practicing "safety in numbers" and all the bots would just hoard together.) Fourth, I doubt a neural network would be very efficient, and I would hope the processor cycles could be better used elsewhere.

A good AI should follow an algorithm similar to what a human would do (plus a fair degree of randomness). It shouldn't be predictable, and it shouldn't be exempt from the rules the player has to follow (omniscient, infinite ammo/mana/stamina, being super strong to compensate for stupidity, etc.). It also should have the rough limitations of a human player (non-zero but realistic and variable reaction time, non-perfect aim, not knowing the exact stats in realtime of the player, not picking the perfect attack every time, etc.). A way to program this would be to have your beta testers explain how they play and program the various tatics into AI algorithms. The AI should use some overarching strategies (pincer attack, various unit combinations, etc.), but it shouldn't use them exclusively (like in Red Alert, the computer would send predictable teams, like 3 Heavy Tanks and a Mammoth Tank, which were ineffective in later game). Perhaps it could even adapt to the player (record and later use player strategies, more frequently use strategies that have worked in the past, do something random to see if it works). While an AI could never play exactly like a human, the difference shouldn't be painfully obvious like it is now. Of course, all of this is my fairly uninformed opinion, and perhaps the AI is better in newer games. I'm just ranting because I've spent litterally thousands of hours playing skirimish missions in various Command and Conquer games and have always wished that I didn't have to use kid's gloves or give it a huge advantage (>3 on 1) when I played it.

Client-side Multiplayer AI

[w33t]

Something that's always bugged me a bit about expansion boards is that the experience can only be enjoyed by the user with the board.

For instance, in a multiplayer game, some players will obviously be getting better graphics than the rest - but often the maps are tailored to work equally well (or at least as equally as possible) to low-end and high-end video cards.

And then there is this new physX card - which sounds like a neat idea, but you have the same kind of situation. You can kind of model physics looking a bit better for the player with the card - but all actual physical actions must be reproducible for the non-card having players.

Now, here is where I think the AI card could be different: distributed processing.

Let's take two human players and 4 AI players in a multiplayer game. Normally the server would be responsible for the AI decision-making processing and would pass to the clients only the x,y,z movement and animation data as a network stream. The AI thinking would take place completely free of the client machines. This puts strain on the server's resources.

Now, imagine rather than the server processing and the clients recieving network info you were to turn this on it's head.

Have the clients process a subset of the AI - say, 2 AI for player 1's machine, and 2 AI for player 2's machine. Now both clients will send the AI's movement information to the server. From the server's point of view the AI would require the same processing power that a regular human player would require (very little - relatively speaking).

With the plethora of bandwidth available client-side these days I think this kind of idea is very realistic.

Re:Client-side Multiplayer AI

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked in the industry on a MMORPG, I agree that it would be nice to use client machines for extra distributed processing, but there are issues.

First, as a rule of thumb in multiplayer development, never trust the client machines for anything other than controller and view data for that player. The client machine is hackable, unlike (supposedly) your server. They can wrap .dll's so that they can modify and view data, in your case data that they may not legitimately have access to, such as "what's beind that wall", and can inject "smart code" of their own to limit the updates the game sends back to the server. Don't trust your players.

Second, although bandwidth is going up, having a remote machine control AIs in-game introduces two issues (off the top of my head). First, if the client machine hosting the AI goes down or loses its connection to the server, the AI will become "brain dead" to all other players in that general area, at least until a new AI controller can be spawned somewhere. As well, that AI has then lost its memory of everything it has experienced up to that point. Second, although bandwidth has increased, latency is still your issue. No longer are state updates for your NPC coming only from the server, they are coming from some remote machine, hitting the server, being validated (if the server is smart at all) and then being propagated to all other players in that area. That introduces a validation check and a second hop, which will slow down AI responsiveness.

We thought about this a fair bit where I worked. We decided that it just wasn't doable.

Nice dream, though. :-)

Re:Separate box just for the gaming HW?

[gEvil (beta)]

And then they can take everything and put it all in a big case with the a monitor and speakers and a special panel with the controls on it. And then all you need to do is put a slot in the front that says $1.

Yet another waste, years late

[MaineCoon]

The product, from a company called AIseek, seeks to do for NPC performance what the PhysX processor does for in-game physics.

They want to completely ruin game performance by killing the PCI bus bandwidth and causing the GPU to stall waiting on the position/orientation and generated geometry that it will have to render?

Physics and AI coprocessors are 2 years too late - with the increasing availability of dual core processors in even midrange consumer systems now, and quad core on the horizon, engineering time is much better spent on making an app multithreaded so that it runs efficiently on hyperthreaded and dual core machines, instead of trying to offload it to a coprocessor that few customers will have. For a consumer, it is a better investment to spend an extra $50 to $100 for a dual core processor than spend $300 on a physics or AI coprocessor.

I doubt, and openly mock, their claims of '200x' speedup. I imagine it will be more like speeding up the process of $200 leaving foolish consumers' wallets.

Re:Separate box just for the gaming HW?

[gregmac]

What may occur is a separate box consisting of the GFX card, Physics Card, AI card, PSU for the above along with supporting memory modules just to power existing games.

what an interesting idea.

Why wouldn't we just use extra cores?

[Rhys]

Since the Mhz jumps of the past seem to be by and large behind us these days, but we're looking at more and more cores, isn't it time that games become multithreaded and offload that nasty pathing work to a second core? Sure you could buy stupid shiny cards for the game physics and AI and network (some sort of network booster that avoids the OS's TCP stack -- posted a while back I believe), or alternatly just make use of the extra hardware that /will/ be in the box anyway.

Now, the decent AI toolkit that folks can license might be worth it anyway, when they figure out they should just run it on the CPU instead of their custom CPU-like-thing.

Welcome to the Dot Bomb v2.0

[Bieeanda]

One might think that the future is piecemeal, given the PhysX card, this thing and the even more ridiculous Killer(TM) NIC, but there's a few small things that the would-be bandwagoneers developing these things don't want to think about.

The first is money. A serious gamer who likes his bells and whistles might be expected to spend several hundred dollars every year or two, in order to make his games run at their prettiest and fastest. He still has a finite budget, though-- asking him to spend a similar amount on physics and AI hardware is unlikely to have the desired effect.

The second is developer support. Developers are stuck in an even bigger pickle: on the one hand, these devices (ideally and theoretically) provide new avenues for gameplay, but the moment that the hardware becomes necessary, they've eliminated a definite percentage of their market.

Three... are these things necessary, or even desirable? The original PhysX demo application, intended to show the effectiveness of the hardware by flinging crates around, ran perfectly smoothly on good hardware once hacked to remove the check for the PhysX processor. The Killer(TM) NIC is pretty much marketing snake-oil to anyone with any knowledge of networking. The 'need' for an AI coprocessor is pretty much obviated by faster main processors. Most games these days haven't been optimized for the multi-core processors that, unlike parlor tricks like PhysX, are actually growing in popularity. Wouldn't it be just that much easier for a developer to assign AI routines and meaningful physics interactions to idle processor cores, rather than constantly shuffling vital data back and forth between peripheral cards?

You mean way of the past, right?

[Yvan256]

Is this the 'way of the future' for PC titles? Will games powered by specific pieces of hardware become the norm?

If you look at the Amiga, I think it had a CPU or co-processor for almost everything...

As for this new thing "doing the same thing as the PhysX processor", we'd have to see this PhysX processor in action (and on the market) first, wouldn't we?

ya, SMP anyone?

[snarkasaurus]

I agree. Intel just released dual core chips, AMD has them already and is about to release quad core chips, plus we have -cheap- dual processor boards available. That'd be eight cores, as soon as AMD releases their new kit.

Even Windows is shipping with SMP available, we have processing capability out the wazoo pretty much. Should be able to handle any AI requirements I'd think and have room to balance your checkbook at the same time.

Some clever lad should be able to design a bot that doesn't do the same thing every single time, eh? Maybe learns to check that blind spot before it sticks its head out. Now THAT would be fun! Better than new eye candy, for sure.

I know this is harsh and all but...

[ThomasBHardy]

Ok I do know I should be more tolerant of my fellow man and all that stuff, but really... this is just damned foolish.

Imagine the conversation that led to this...

-misty flashback fade-

Marketing Guy : Oh man, gaming is ready for a revolution!
Technical Guy : It's called a Wii now

Marketing Guy : Huh? We now what? -shakes head- I mean these gamers, they buy top end stuff, they have money to burn!

Technical Guy : Not really, they buy slightly under the curve and tweak up and overclock mostly
Marketing Guy : No no I read in a magazine that all gamers have more common sense than money
Technical Guy : -sigh-

Marketing Guy : These Ageis guys really whipped up a lot of frenzy about a new type of add on card.
Technical Guy : Yeah it's supposed to make the gamers run better by adding physics processing but the demo..
Marketing Guy : And they are making money hand over fist!
Technical Guy : Well, actually...

Marketing Guy : And it's so easy to make specialty stuff!!
Technical Guy : But their demo runs the same even without the card!

Marketing Guy : Wait, Wait, I got it! We'll make a card that adds more CPU power!
Technical Guy : Well dual cores add lots of CPu power that has yet to be tapped by games
Marketing Guy : No wait, even better, we'll make it special! That's what made the Ageis guys rich!

Technical Guy : Listen, the Ageis guys are not selling much, you might not want to...
Marketing Guy : We'll add better AI! That's IT!

Technical Guy : Better AI?
Marketing Guy : Yeah, we'll sell a card that makes the games run better!
Technical Guy : How's that work?
Marketing Guy : We'll umm, make it able to process AI commands like a graphics card processes graphics commands.

Technical Guy : But Graphics Commands are standardized, so they can optimize for that.
Marketing Guy : We'll get them to standardize AI commands.

Technical Guy : -twitches- But, every game has different needs from AI
Marketing Guy : So we'll make it flexible, generic, so it can do anything

Technical Guy : If it's generic processor design, it's the same as a regular CPU.
Marketing Guy : Exactly!

Technical Guy : But then what is it's advantage?
Marketing Guy : Haven't you been listening? It'll make games play BETTER!

My bet: it won't fly

[archeopterix]

I think it won't repeat the success of 3d acceleration, because AI is quite unlike 3D. The key factor in 3d accelerators' success is IMHO a very good set of primitives. If you are fast at drawing large numbers of textured triangles potentially obscuring each other, then you are there (almost) - you can accelerate practically any 3d game. I don't see anything like this in AI. Well, perhaps a generic depth-first search accelerator for brute force algorithms, but the problem I see with that is that the search spaces will vary from game to game, so you probably won't be faster than your current multi-core generic CPU.

It seems that those guys did what's best under these circumstances - got a specific search space that is common in many games and specialized in that. IMHO, it's not enough to get the snowball rolling, but time will tell.

What does this need.

[ScaryFroMan]

So for optimal performance, I need two video cards, a physics card, an AI card, a sound card, and a network card. And even then, that's leaving out stuff like a RAID or SCSI controller. Sounds great, but where's a motherboard that can support more than one PCI card with both PCI-E slots filled? Hell, a lot of motherboards can't even handle one.

Thing is

[Sycraft-fu]

That will drastically alter gameplay. You'd literally have to design the game twice, once for dumb AI, once for smart AI. As an example, look at the difference between the original Doom, and Doom 3. While Doom 3's monsters aren't brain surgeons, they are smart enough to sneak around, take cover, etc. If you were to apply those tactics to the massive numbers of monsters in the original Doom, you'd have a near impossible game. Likewise if you put the dumb, "walk straight at the player" AI in Doom 3, the challenge would be gone.

Now this is just the case with a game where AI is fairly unimportant in the scheme of things. In a game where it highly relies on the AI, say one where squad tactics are used, it'd be a nightmare. With the card you have highly competent teammates that practically complete a mission for you, without it you have guys stepping on their own grenades, things like that.

AI also has the problem of being different for different games. I'm sure the AI process for an imp in Doom 3 is nothing like the AI process for an enemy civ in Civilization 4. Thus I don't know there's a way you can provide a more "optimised" kind of chip for it. Graphics accelerators work because you can design a chip that's highly specialized. They'd suck as CPUs, and in fact until very very recently weren't even Turing complete. However since graphics is always the same kind of thing, they can be optimised to do certain things very fast. I just don't think that's the case with AI, since there's so many kind of AIs one might need.

Can we please not even

[goldcd]

entertain this notion? This card is doomed.
The PhysX card is doomed
Multicore CPUs are here - no longer some weird expensive ninja-component, they merely cost a few $/£ more than a single core.
Currently nothing (non-industrial) really takes advantage of multi-core systems - the spiel for them currently seems to be 'Run an AV scan without slowing your game' - that's it.
*rubs crystal ball*
What's going to happen is the established middle-ware (i.e those with a product people use now) will develop engines that 'run on a core'. Current core #1 will run the game and core #2 will run the physics and eventually core #3 will be the AI, #4 will run the procedural graphics, #5 will do the 12.1 audio etc.
If you look what's being developed for the PS3 (the most insanely multicored CPU so far), the cores are being divided up by function - one for the OS menu, one for the lead characters hair etc. Threading a single function across multiple cores is not only insanely hard, but hinders cross-platform porting.
Middleware is just going to be sold to run on one core and ported per platform - and I'm fine with that.

A Field Programmable Gate Array would make sense

[Colin Smith]

Program the physics, graphics and AI routines into hardware. Offload the processing onto the FPGA. Call it a generic games accelerator. The games developers could then optimise their own libraries of hardware routines for their games rather than trying to optimise the games for general purpose hardware.