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'Neurotic' is Best RTS strategy
An anonymous reader writes "Austrian researchers experimenting with adding emotion to game AI say that 'neurotic' software is best at RTS. They developed aggressive, defensive, neutral and neurotic bots to play Age of Mythology, based on psychological models of emotion. Neurotic bots beat the standard game AI every time and faster than the other personalities."
This tells us more about the game-play balance in AoM than how to approach games in general. I'd be more interested in seeing these bots play CiV 4 where I doubt that neurotic behaviour would triumph.
I discovered that a hardcore neurotic kind of strategy worked well in Lords of the Realm 2 when playing with my brother. He didn't care, and would rather have the game over quicker than not, so when we started the game he immediately spent all his resources on getting weapons and a huge army, and within four turns or so had come over and whooped my ass. Every single other aspect of his kingdom was in shambles, but he had the element of surprise, and that's all that ended up mattering.
I'm thinking the AI would think something similar to me... "Surely he won't try that. If he fails in his attack, he'll just fall over on his own accord in a few turns." Unless he doesn't.
why women always get their way. Opponents simply throw up their hands in despair and surrender.
The neurotic bots are more likely to make odd moves that (seemingly) have little or nothing to do with the moves made by computer players. The computer AI is likely a lot more structured, and takes a while to shift strategies to compensate for the odd behavior of the bot, leaving the bot more breathing room.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Faster is better now? Then why did they bother to code the defensive personality?
This whole study compares how the four AI bots did against the game's built-in AI. I'd like to know how the four "personality" types did against each other, as well. Even then, the whole study is limited to the gameplay mechanics of this one game. That's not to say that the information isn't useful--just that it's pretty limited at this point.
This guy's the limit!
... is this perhaps reflective of real life personalities, such as those who are best at war mongering?
i.e. would have Hitler been considered neurotic?
OK so they made a program that was better than some existing AI for some strategy game whose rules are particular to that game. This doesn't tell us a lot because we don't know how strong the existing AI was, and have no real way to measure that. It could just be that the 'neurotic' program happened to exploit flaws existing in the current computer player. That doesn't tell us much about how well it would fare against humans.
To get a meaningful result they'd need to test the different programs against experienced, intelligent human opposition. Or better, stop messing around with real-time strategy games and design AI for a game whose rules are already well-known. If a 'neurotic' or 'emotional' player program starts beating the 'purely logical' computer engines in chess, then I'll take notice. We know that the existing AI for chess is quite good (and there is a choice of several strong engines to test against) so any advance over that is likely to be genuine and not just exploiting obvious flaws in some existing program.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Everytime you tell a story you have to set a certain limit where you just have to assume the person you are talking too understands your words. For instance, you just seem to assume that I know what an acronym is. That I get your use of the word "drift" what does your racing style have to do with slashdot editors?
This is slashdot, we do NOT explain words like RAM or CPU. If you don't understand those acronyms, you do not belong here. This is furthermore the game section of slashdot and Real Time Strategy is a well known genre of games. Do we have to explain FPS as well? (First Person Shooter) How about 3D?
At a certain point you just have to decide, allright my audience just knows this, and if they don't they are not my audience. If you don't, you end up like mainstream publications that have to dumb down everything to such an extent that EVERYONE feels insulted.
One of the more intresting approaches I have seen is/was (not sure if it still exists) is the dutch childerens news. It leaves out some stories but uses the extra time to more deeply explain the rest so that a person with limited world knowledge (like a kid or an american) can still follow what is happening in the world. You can also clearly see the problem there, they need a lot more time to cover the same event.
So unless you want slashdot stories to run several pages and be linked to hell to wikipedia, you are just going to have to use your own brain. This is the internet, the answer is only a few clicks away.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
maybe this goes to show how the neurotic leaders of ages past came to such power. some of the roman emperors were not known for being the most stable minds.
I don't know karate, but I do know CAAA- RAAAY-ZEEEE!
--
make install -not war
"It's a machine, CmdrTaco. It isn't Neurotic. It doesn't get pissed off, it doesn't get happy, it doesn't get sad, it doesn't laugh at your jokes... IT JUST PWNS j00r A$$!!!"
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"Twitchy psychopath" works best in FPS, and Tourette syndrome seems to dominate Barrens chat in WoW
More music, fewer hits
Okay, ignoring the fact that I fail to believe that we are anywhere near even a rudimentary simulation of primitive emotional concepts, not matter how abstracted, when it comes to implementing an AI:
The default AI in most games is terrible - even just writing a "do-random-stuff" AI would probably beat the in-game AI 20-50% of the time (provided you put in simple anti-suicide routines, like not using up all it's available funds etc.). Most AI in games relies on the fact that it knows everything that's going on (including exactly how long until their next unit is built, how many pixels you are away before it can fire on you, how much gold it will have by then etc.) and will generalise EVERYTHING (i.e. it'll be in "attack" or "defense", "hard" or "soft", "co-operative" or "go-it-alone"). Most games have a variety of "sliders" on the AI and the games-makers tweak them either randomly, in steps for each more difficult level or according to a pre-built AI "profile" (e.g. cautious but fast etc.).
In some games, that's more than enough to give anyone a challenge, at least until they are nearing the end of the game's useful lifetime. Snooker/pool games spring to mind. You won't beat a "top-level" AI on a snooker/pool game. It knows exactly where everything will go, even several "moves" in advance if necessary and can play a perfect game if required.
RTS's though, are much harder to simulate. Yes, there are a lot of factors involved in the creation, strength, durability, mobility etc. of units but at the end of the day it's a military tactics game. Pixel-perfect positioning of a nice ambush will keep the computer in an endless loop of "attack, run away, heal, attack, run away, heal".
I've not played AoM much, I'm an AoE2 fan personally, but the AI was amazingly easy to overwhelm with just a simple early-game rush, confuse with an impenetrable fortress hiding some long-range weapons and particularly predictable when it comes to individual AI tactics.
All AI's are predictable to a point in mass-market games - you can always "learn" to beat the AI in any particular game. Granted, it may be hard to do, it may be different to other similar games, but there's always some point at which you "know" what it's going to do.
It seems to me that, given that, an AI that is very "jittery" and over-compensates might beat the in-game AI in some games. However, on others, even in the same genre, it would get trounced. The "researchers" are assuming that the in-game AI is somehow a good approximation of a "neutral" player. They are also assuming that they have programmed each type of AI without any glaring logic holes in their tactics and that they are all equally matched in terms of capabilities. A cautious AI would win over a boisterous AI in only 50% of games.
More importantly, it's only a test of AI programming skill, not what "personalities" are trying to be reflected by the coders.
I know you were just making a joke, but I feel like taking it seriously anyway.
Well, sort of seriously, anyway.
The cultural tradition of women getting their way stems, in my opinion, from the cultural reinforcement of addictive tendencies in men. More specifically, addiction to sexuality. While the male sex drive is strong, cultural influences encourage even more slavery to this impulse, and further incline one to view a low sex drive (or even just a stoic level of self-control) as a lack of masculinity, or simply put, as weakness.
The end result is that men adopt a strongly sex-driven persona which in turn gives their women great control over thier behavior.
In other words, our notion of horny=manly sets us all up to become p-whiped.
The door swings both ways. Biology + cultural reinforcement inclines women (at least American women) to want romance (especially to be seen in public with a man who is showering affection on her). Learn to grant and withold that, and you can start getting your way too.
If a 'neurotic' or 'emotional' player program starts beating the 'purely logical' computer engines in chess, then I'll take notice.
But thats just it. Chess allows only for the "Next Best Move". Playing an illogical move only results in the player playing it to loose because it puts them at a disadvantage and the logical computer simply knows the counter moves anyways for your worst move.
As in...
A logical AI assumes you'll play the next best possible move, but if you play the next possible worst move you are in a worse position and the AI simply knows the next best move and plays for that, but if you still keep playing the worst possible move you will only end up loosing faster.
In that regards, a logical chess program would be an AI or human who plays non-logically.
However, the reason why an RTS is important is because Chess is a limited game to a certain subset of rules that a computer can brute force all possible best moves.
However, in real world combat situations, there are no set definitions of strategies because you are simply allowed almost infinite possibilities of winning.
Lets say we take a human pilot or an AI pilot in actual Fighter combat in the skies (we'll see this scenario in the next 20 years) and pit them against each other in a real world situation. A logical AI would understand what the next best move is and the pilot will have an idea of what a logical AI would do.
However, the human pilot might do something crazy it knows it can throw off the AIs strategy like flowing into a nearby storm cloud or perhaps into a dangerous maneuver through a canyon or city landscape (under bridges and between buildings) which might throw the logical AI off.
After a while, a human pilot would have a general strategy with dealing with an AI that didn't adapt. He would know how an AI would react and be able to defeat it without too much effort.
Now a completely crazy AI would basically confuse the human and also other AIs who assuming the other AI was going to do in its next best move. Since in the real world (and in RTS) there are almost infinite combinations of what you can do in real combat, being unpredictable really helps win battles.
But like I said... Chess only has a limited set of moves. I would be an illogical AI would do far better at a game of Go than his logical counterpart.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The presentation is light on details, and I haven't had time to poke around the researchers' websites, but, at first blush, I wonder whether the results have much to do with psychology per se? Rather, these guys have shown, in a round-about way, that the AoM "AI" is not very strong; in particular, that it's overly cautious and "leaves a lot on the table": given available resources, it could go on the offensive sooner than it does. That's why the "aggressive" and "neurotic" agents do so well against it. Playing AoM is a very complex dynamic programming problem, and it's anyone's guess what sort of objective function its authors have constructed, but now we can see that a fairly coarse re-weighting could significantly improve it. I don't think that the general take-way here ought to be that "neurotic" agents do well in strategic games (contract to the classic "tit-for-tat" repeated-games result).
That said, from the introduction of the presentation one can see that the real goal of this effort is to create bots that *people enjoy playing against*. That's probably only loosely related to the absolute strength of the opponent, and it makes complete sense that it would be thrilling to be up against an AI that can suddenly just "take a flyer" and surprise you.
"I am just a customs officer; but I, too, wish to understand what is going on" -- Bertold Brecht