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US Army To Use MMOs For Turing Tests
Massively points out an article about new research projects for the US Army. One of the projects will evidently involve testing their AI capabilities in popular MMOs, including World of Warcraft and EVE Online.
"They're working on creating 'photorealistic looking and acting human beings' that can think on their own, have emotions and talk in local slang. 'I actually interact with virtual humans in terms of asking them questions and they're responding,' Parmentola said. To test out the computer generated humans' 'humanity,' Parmentola and his researchers want to unleash some of their cyber Soldiers into so-called 'massively multi-player online games' such as World of Warcraft or Eve Online — games frequented by thousands of super-competitive human players in teams of virtual characters fighting battles that can last for days. 'We want to use the massively multi-player online game as an experimental laboratory to see if they're good enough to convince humans that they're actually human,' he said."
This was already posted
I read that as being "sarcastic", what else does the author of this so called, 'news post' call an MMO?
So they'll act like retarded 12-year olds?
So, how long will it be before the bots develop an Elizia test? Setup, two interactions, one a WoW player, the other a .bat file. See if you can spot the difference!
Come on, I know AI is hard, but do you really need to lower the bar that much you have to dig a hole?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
if you want to test AI's I suggest you use adventure and puzzle games (for mature audiences, not for youth).
MMO's are the most automated of games. They don't involve thought, they involve grinding, grinding, and more grinding.
If they're going to use this as a metric for AI's, I think they should just buy up glider and connect its attacks to real weapons.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
... until Blizzard cans their account for using a bot.
US ARMY - "VIRTUAL ONLINE INTERNET GAME USING ETHERNET CONNECTIONS AND PROGRAMMING" - ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LOG
PARMENTOLA0WNZ: heh. are u a robot?
SEPHIROTH112: WHAT THE HELL IS THIS TP ME BACK TO BARRENS YOUR NOT A GM
PARMENTOLA0WNZ: my god, men. weve done it.
LOG ENDS
Somedays I wonder if humans playing WoW could pass the Turing Test let alone bots ...
"HEAL PLX!" "LF3M GOT TANK BRD!" etc etc...
Can they be banned for "botting"?
You don't need intelligence let alone artificial intelligence to interact with people in those MMO games
i think if the military is looking for a game to use it would be halo. its exachly what the military wants exept that the n00b totaly PWNing them is a in-active sloth. they also might be able to use COD4. i think these games would better suit the military than WOW.
Its not my fault, someone put a wall in my way.
In other news, Blizzard is looking forward to record profits in the coming quarters from windfall lawsuits against the government willfully violating their terms of service.
In other other news, after reaching an agreement with the US government, the Chinese government seeks to reach similar terms to investigate Turing-complete gold farmers pointing out that gold farming is an intrinsically human activity and that a bot that could accomplish the same ends would be a great boon to society.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Tester: sup bot?
Bot: Are you very interested in sup bot?
Tester: what?
Bot: I see. And how does that make you feel?
I do not think the goal is artificial intelligence, i think, from the description of the research, its artificial stupidity. First it will fool WoW players, then it will move on up the ladder to tests subjects like mice with cancerous brain tumors, piles of cardboard, and eventually, cocker spaniels.
I'll be honest, if i can get several million dollars worth of AI research as my gang mate, i don't care. I'd even let the thing join my corp if it could fit and fly a decent pvp ship. But the learning curve is hard for a person, i doubt a machine could do it without lots of specifics scripted in. But it's fun to speculate if it would be a highsec griefer, lowsec pirate, carebear, 0.0 nano-nut, or sit in an asteroid belt and mine all day?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
I doubt its at all what the military wants. The reasearch has nothing to do with fps's, or combat, or video games at all, its to do with human-human interaction where the focus is not completely on language. Computers can deal with spacial information a lot easier than irregular linguistic information. I think the goal is to have them 'fool' 'people' (yes, both in quotes), without tackling the hard problem of imitating spoken language.
...just like civilians (only with markedly fewer pacifists) who would rather play MMOs all day than be in warzones.
I've come up with silly excuses in work before involving needing to test my product's behaviour undewr server load by running alongside an FPS etc and this is just the natural extension when the alternative is far more dire and the budget orders of magnitude greater. To the guy who wrote the convincing research proposal, bravo! The only safe government is an idle government.
http://archive.gamespy.com/fargo/august03/autorpg/
How exactly are they going to pull this off? Botting is against the TOS for most MMOs, so I'm pretty sure a bot, even if it chats along with its team-mates, is still going to be considered "cheating" according to the company that runs the MMO.
i dont want militaristic stuff being conducted in my mmo. no tolerance there. i may corpsecamp those avatars you employ to research to the extent of being unable to interact with the game. and im sure i wont be alone in this. take your sh#t elsewhere.
for any idiots who may err 'on the side of wisdom', i have done 1.5 years of military service, and i very well know what that sh#t is, whereas im sure most of you who read this post dont. we dont need that in our games. period.
Read radical news here
I've actually accused a couple of people in MMOs of being AIs. I wonder if they were Army tardbots...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Mr. President, we must not allow a goldfarmer gap!
If the virtual human logs off WoW and starts searching the Interweb for p0rn, it passes.
Have gnu, will travel.
I really really think that they'll run into the "no bots" issues presented in many games' terms. Of course, they could make a MMO for their AI bots to play on and not ever bother people playing real games.
See Automatic Goblin Therapist.
It's an add-on for WoW that acts like Eliza in reply to chat from other players. The download page also has some "best-of" conversations.
more of the same on Twitter.
I'm pretty sure that these MMOs would ban anyone from using a bot to play, right? It will be interesting to see if their AI can not raise flag with the cheater/fraud departments.
ok, and who said these gaming companies will accept BOTS in their servers?
I for one am quite sure that the official acceptance of any bot will stir quite an uprising from the eve online crowd.
yet more mention of the potential existence of Aura..
while WoW might be A, world. It certainly isnt The World.
I wonder what MOS this falls under. It sure as hell wasn't there when I enlisted in August.
Then perhaps we would let it read Slashdot! Snrk.
Well that would require a slightly higher line count on its core logic. Emulating a 12 year old tard won't cut it. You'll have to increase the requirement to slightly oder CS-major college boy.
10 KILL (PORING)
20 PRINT "Lolz!!!11!!oneone"
30 GOTO 10
suddenly have to be increased to
10 PRINT "Fr1st ps0t !!!"
15 PRINT "M$ Windoze is teh sucksorz !!!"
20 PRINT "Natalie Portman in Soviet Russia !!!11!!oneone"
30 GOTO 10
See ? More lines of code required.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
MMO's such as WoW only seem like a grind because previous players have played through the game and formulated optimal strategies for each situation.
There are "addons" to the user interface that a player can install that will tell you where to go for quests or what types of strategies to use for situations that require a coordinated group for 10-40 people. But again, these addons were created by other players and contain information provided by previous players.
It would be fairly trivial to test if the AI can follow specific set of directions provided by previous human players. The real challenge is, given a completely new situation, can the AI react to the situation and formulate a strategy that will ensure success?
For example, in the endgame content, there are these "raids" that require a highly coordinated group for 10-40 players. There is a great deal of information about how to get through each of these raid encounters now since previous players have done them. However, can you imagine how it would have been for the first players to do these raids? They had to actually read the bits of information gathered from quests and devise a strategy through experimentation. There were no addons that told these players what was going to happen next or what to do.
Maybe in that sense, that is what they are trying to accomplish with the AI. Testing it's ability to formulate strategies from experimentation and bits of information gathered from limited dialogue; not just simply scanning packets for information or following scripted instructions like what bots can do.
U.S. Department of Defence - The Pentagon
List of Expenditures for January 09
RAU1 Warheads (22) - USD 213,000
F99 Assault Planes (3) - USD 3,000,000
World of Warcraft (40) - USD 9.99
The Burning Crusade (40) - USD 9.99
Wrath of the Lich King (40) - USD 39.99
M121 Uzi (20) - USD 4,321