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AI System Invents New Card Games (For Humans)
jtogel writes "This New Scientist article describes our AI system that automatically generates card games. The article contains a description of a playable card game generated by our system. But card games are just the beginning... The card game generator is a part of a larger project to automatise all of game development using artificial intelligence methods — we're also working on level generation for a variety of different games, and on rule generation for simple arcade-like games."
Creating games or levels is pretty simple (well, relatively speaking) in comparison to making them fun. Bu the myriad of bad games out there, I would say that making good games or levels is something not even natural intelligence masters routinely. It is bound to fail trying to do it with AI. Nonetheless a nice research benchmark. But please stop trying to imply real-world usability where there is none. It is unethical and unprofessional.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Shall we play Global Thermonuclear War?
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Each player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven. .. Two jacks are a "half-fizzbin". If you have a half-fizzbin: a third jack is a "shralk" and results in disqualification. One wants a king and a deuce, except at night ...when one wants a queen and a four. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays.
Programmers make me laugh hysterically sometimes. Seriously, when in the history of man has an entire portion of an industry been dedicated to the following two goals:
1) Obsolescence of all current vocational knowledge in their field on 5-15 year scales.
2) The ultimate goal of their work is the removal of their job position from the market (the singularity which can hack in C).
On a tangentally related idea, we're working on a project of machine learning to take games and the rules of play, then derive strategy based on the rules.
Nothing particularly new, except we don't define what winning is, just the rules of the game. No hint is given to what constitutes good play, or even what "playing" is. Although it is a very slow process depending on game complexity (learning can take weeks and sometimes months of processing time), it requires no real programming effort, beause we don't have to know what "good" play is or some series of algorithms; it produces better and better tactics and strategies of play during the learning process, by experimenting with the rules, how to play, and such.
What's cool about this, is that you can watch it teaching itself different strategies and tactics. Some of the "tactics" it creates are many times counter intuitive or plain bizarre, but based on the overall strategies it develops, allows for some really different playing experiences as it doesn't follow human game logic based on experience with "similar" games or "intuition".
I'm a satanic clam.
I see MMO expansions someday taking this route to expedite content generation. Players complain there's not enough content? Drag and drop your quest generator with a bit of human tweaking and you're good to go. I'm sure some of the systems in Eve were generated partly through random generation.
It turns out that procedural generation is conceptually pretty easy; but making it good is much harder. Early videogames(from the era where memory and storage constraints were Serious Business) and demoscene stuff(where the constraints are wholly artificial; but that's the point of the exercise) are pretty much forced to rely on it heavily because they simply didn't have the option of storing canned content.
Today, though, you see games with substantially greater amounts of (not inexpensive) artists and designers thrown at them, and gigabytes of art assets, with hand-tweaking especially evident in places where the player is likely to look closely(eg. generic NPCs will be thrown together from parts, giving the world a varied population without requiring the art people to hand-model 10,000 different 'bandit' characters; but the risk of output that just looks a little off, or hit a few branches of the ugly tree on the way down, means that those critical NPCs that follow you around for half the game had their appearance nailed down precisely). The fact that artists are slow and expensive has created a demand for procedural generation tools, and quite a few exist(I'll just mention SpeedTree, purely because the phrase "SpeedTree for Games has been the gaming industry's premier vegetation solution since 2002" amuses me); but the problem of creating really good environments continues to be vexing enough that titles that can afford it throw a lot of humans at the problem.
It's not too difficult to conceptualize people creating a computer that can design games based upon numerical or statistical elements, such as a deck of 52 cards divided into numbers and sets. Show me a computer than can take a theme (let's say, WWII tactical), create abstract mechanics that reflect playable functionality within that theme (let's say combat rules for historically accurate factions/units/weapons) and then make it fun (Combat Commander anyone?)....well, then I will bow to our new artificial overlords.
There is at least one board game that was computer designed: Yavalath. Yavalath was designed algorithmically by Cameron Browne, as described in his PhD thesis "Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Recombination Games". See his publications here:
http://www.cameronius.com/