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Next Gen Beautiful But Brainless?
Next Generation has up a short piece discussing a Guardian Interview with AI developer Steve Grand. Grand opines that next-gen graphics are deepening the uncanny valley. More than just plastic looks and inhuman faces, the weakness of game AI is increasingly becoming glaring compared to the graphical prowess in games. "AI isn't so much unappreciated as nonexistent. Most of what counts as AI in the games industry is actually a bunch of 'if/then' statements. If a computer character doesn't learn something for itself then the programmer must have told it what to do, and anything that does exactly what it's told and nothing else is not intelligent. This is changing, and neural networks and other learning systems are beginning to creep in. But games programmers tend to devalue the phrase 'artificial intelligence."
Sell a bunch of games that are only good for playing online because the single-player campaign is only like three hours long. That way you don't have to worry about AI since the game is too short for anyone to notice.
This also increases revenue by allowing developers to sell half-finished games, then soak players for more money by selling the other half of the game as "additional content".
Sony, of course, would be using this strategy as well, but they've only sold about five PS3s, so it's not really an issue.
'AI' refers to an obsolete field of CS which is rapidly being replaced by NN, pattern classification and statistical learning theory. 'Game AI' refers to heuristics that programmers hack together at 3am before shipping a title.
word.