The State of Game AI

Gamasutra has a summary written by Dan Kline of Crystal Dynamics for this year's Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) Conference held at Stanford University. They discussed why AI capabilities have not scaled with CPU speed, balancing MMO economies and game mechanics, procedural dialogue, and many other topics. Kline also wrote in more detail about the conference at his blog. "... Rabin put forth his own challenge for the future: Despite all this, why is AI still allowed to suck? Because, in his view, sharp AI is just not required for many games, and game designers frequently don't get what AI can do. That was his challenge for this AIIDE — to show others the potential, and necessity, of game AI, to find the problems that designers are trying to tackle, and solve them."

Comments

An example of great game A.I.

[B5_geek]

The one game that has always stood out in my mind as having great A.I. was Comanche Maximum Overkill. The original (386DX-40 era) DOS game actually advertised in the manual that if you repeat the same attack pattern for 30 seconds then the game would adapt, AND IT DID!

Imagine this scenario; you are in a helicopter hiding behind a hill. Whenever a bad-guy gets close enough, you pop-up above the hill, get a missile lock, fire, then drop below the hill. If you repeat this pattern long-enough (30+ seconds) then enemy copters will sneak up behind you and blow you up. I was always impressed at this "Learning A.I." as opposed to what most computers games do.

RTS/TBS: build stuff quicker then you can and/or advance technology faster then should be possible.
FPS: Have 'super accurate' shots, higher health, bigger guns.

Re:An example of great game A.I.

[SnowZero]

This to me is a huge downfall of modern games - instead of making AI opponents "smarter", devs simply tweak the rules to give the AI more of an advantage.

Indeed. Cheating AIs make me cringe. I'd really rather see a dumber AI that doesn't know where every unit on the level is, than play a more "skilled" one that's just using the fact that it's not playing the same game to gain its advantage.

That being said, it is incredibly hard to define an AI that doesn't have "unrealistic" skills when the players' skills are advancing in the same fashion. For example, your skill in Halo is to a large extent determined by how accurate you are, which is easily mimicked by AI. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone accused of using an "aimbot" because their skill (or luck) in an FPS seemed "too good" or "unrealistic". The same goes for RTS games - the top human players in the world are to a large degree measured by how many commands, or actions, they can perform in a minute - which is again easily transferred to an AI opponent.

It's hard to define, but not necessarily hard to measure. Record a bunch of humans playing, look at plots of where they aim based on location, distance, velocity, etc, and build a statistical model. Or, if you've got something more algorithm based, measure it the same way and make sure its distribution on plots looks fairly human. Of course, game companies will have to be willing to hire statistics/AI type people (or train their devs in those areas), and devote the money to gather player data and time to make it happen. So far few companies have gone that route, but I think more will in the future.

Several years ago I went to an AI conference (AAAI), and they had a quake bot that was coded by some rule-based AI experts (SOAR bot). I was into quake quite a bit at the time, and I'd have to say that was the most fun human-like AI I've played in a game where the player and AI had equal footing (same unit(s) and capabilities). I don't think the game companies have been willing to hire those kind of people yet, but as I said before, hopefully that will change, especially once customers realize that screenshots don't always mean good gameplay.

P.S. I did AI/Robotics for my degrees, and work on machine learning for a living. Haven't worked in the game industry, but I've worked with a bunch of people in school who have gone into that.