Computer Scientists Invents Game-Developing Computer AI

MojoKid writes "Over the past few years, short game writing 'jams' have become a popular way to bring developers together in a conference with a single overarching theme. These competitions are typically 24-48 hours long and involve a great deal of caffeine, frantic coding, and creative design. The 28th Ludum Dare conference held from December 13 — 16 of this past year was one such game jam — but in this case, it had an unusual participant: Angelina. Angelina is a computer AI designed by Mike Cook of Goldsmiths, London University. His long-term goal is to discover whether an AI can complete tasks that are generally perceived as creative. The long-term goal is to create an AI that can 'design meaningful, intelligent and enjoyable games completely autonomously.' Angelina's entry into Ludum Dare, dubbed 'To That Sect'" is a simple 3D title that looks like it hails from the Wolfenstein era. Angelina's initial game is simple, but in reality Angelina is an AI that can understand the use of metaphor and build thematically appropriate content, which is pretty impressive. As future versions of the AI improve, the end result could be an artificial intelligence that 'understands' human storytelling in a way no species on Earth can match."

Comments

What's that smell?

[narcc]

Smells like bullshit to me. What do you think?

Re:What's that smell?

[ireallyhateslashdot]

Did you check out the link? See the game? Yes, it's entirely possible that an AI wrote this game. That said, it's kind of a crappy game. It's very short, and doesn't have much in the way of emotional involvement. I'm still excited to see what the future holds...

Re:What's that smell?

[GODISNOWHERE]

This story isn't bullshit, and might make for mildly interesting cocktail party chat, but it isn't really newsworthy.

As future versions of the AI improve, the end result could be an artificial intelligence that "understands" human storytelling in a way no species on Earth can match.

This probably does qualify as bullshit, and it was only was only added because the author thought the story itself isn't strong enough to stand without it. Tech writers have to fill quotas. The problem with this peroration isn't just that it's stupid and wrong—it is—the problem is that it gives people the wrong expectations for what AI can do. AI has already had significant payoffs. The Dynamic Analysis and Planning Tool (DART), an "intelligent agent" (a dirty word after the AI winter) written in Common Lisp and used by the U.S military was introduced in 1991 and by 1995 had saved enough money to pay for all of the money DARPA has spent on AI in the previous thirty years.

Re:What's that smell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. It's entirely possible to create a program that will create a game, complete with a story, boss stages and the lot. In fact, if the army of developers who shaped Angelina was big enough, she could be developed to create games of any genre (be it FPS, RTS, RPG, arcade, etc). However, that will not make Angelina any more intelligent than the default calculator provided by our respective OSes.

Now, show us Angelina making decisions to autonomously change the genre, story, bosses, etc, in a way that fulfills Dennett'esque or Sartre'esque imagination theories and we can start calling it AI. Till then these stories only serve as a means of impressing the uninitiated - which is definitely important if the field of AI is to get the attention it deserves.

Re:What's that smell?

[gl4ss]

did you read the fucking article?

"While the theme of the game (You Only Get One) was a pre-coded template, Angelina chose the color of the walls, the textures, the ambient sound track." and did a shitty job at doing it.

add some theming ai to nethack and *boom* infinitely more "ai" than this(though both are just content generators, not game designers, and content generators for games are old hat).

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

it's 2014 you idiot

Cloudberry Kingdom

[HalAtWork]

Cloudberry Kingdom, Spelunky, and many rogue-likes all do this on a smaller level, but are always constrained by parameters. While they seek to create an AI that will take on more of the tasks, it will still have to be fed parameters created by an author, so unless this AI can create itself, how can it be called truly creative? Rather it is just procedural generation. It may be worth doing but calling it creative is hyperbolic.

Re:Cloudberry Kingdom

[Trepidity]

I agree that the word "creative" is usually questionable, but in my mind procedural generation of game content (levels, characters, dialog, trees, ...) versus procedural generation of game rules is an interesting difference. There is definitely some gray area between them, but I think they aren't identical either.

One practical difference is that doing rule-generation well seems harder. There are some very good level generators, but I have yet to see a truly impressive rule-generation system. There are a number of attempts, of which the most successful to date is probably Ludi, a system that successfully designed a board game that seems to be considered legit in the community of people that play that particular type of board game. But that's a far cry from full game design.

Re:Absurd

[wonkey_monkey]

If it makes the front page of Slashdot in 2014, it has by definition already made the front page somewhere else in 2013.

Re:pardon my drunk-on, BUT

[eyenot]

Thomas Kuhn would just point out that shifting your paradigm in and out of frame and babbling on about AI while you basically lower your standards of what "creative" means is fucking STUPID

fucking stupid premise, fucking stupid article, fucking stupid stupid.

god, what autistic mish-mash are we going to be exposed to next

probably some article about how autism is the new normal. hipsters haven't had enough of that shit, yet. you have to have precisely 3.14 articles of that topic every year or "life" isn't definitively hip-ronic enough.

fucking hipster dumb shit. what self respecting intelligent person ("nerd") doesn't puke at this shit and wish the sprinkler system would turn on in this guy's computer room?

Re:pardon my drunk-on, BUT

[Camembert]

If I read the article correctly, the impressive part is not that the game takes place in a generated maze, but rather that the AI created from scratch a game, however simple, that takes place inside that world. That step which involves working with concepts is far from trivial.

Re:What does this mean

[eyenot]

In A World
where one programmer

*keys clicking*
*CRT fixed-width reflecting on eyeglass lens*
*sudden black screen and gasp*

who relates more closely to computers than to people

*boy and a girl walking side by side*
GIRL: "think you'll come to the party tonight?"
GUY: "do you think computers like Titanic?"
GIRL: "excuse me?"
GUY: "I can show you the world!"

decides enough is enough

GIRL: "I don't think we can see each other."
GUY: "do you think computers have feelings?"

*explosions*
*people dying*

and retreats into his basement to create his own entire world

*guy guzzling 2-liter*

GUY: "I'm going to add the airborn mine cart explosion that can send a dwarf flying through the air and landing in another mine cart today"
OTHER GUY: "you got rent?"

follow us into a world where reality is all topsy-turvy

GUY: "The computer isn't just playing the game. The computer is LEARNING."

*record scratch*

OTHER GUY: "You're telling it what to do."
GUY: "Yeah but I'm telling it it's called do_learn(token).... what? Jeez, shut up!"

and where dreams become reality

GUY: "I can actually make the game program itself, now."
GIRL: "Wow, that's so cool. What's that symbol mean?"
GUY: "Oh, it looks like the game thought it would be a good idea to make itself be about elephants humping with a quest goal of finding a lost abacus."
GIRL: "I have to go. I hear my mom. LET ME GO."

this spring, get ready, to re-define your entire sense of what creativity means

OTHER GUY: "You can't have a flight sim that's about penguins and walruses absorbing blocks of gelatin through their bellies and shooting skyscrapers out of their mouths"
GUY: "It -- it wasn't me. It was THE GAME!"
OTHER GUY: "Yeah but it's stupid."
GUY: "ITH NOT THUPAAAAAGGGHHHHD!"

from the same people that brought you Unsolvable Sokoban, Endless Sudoku, and Eliza

GUY: "It's like it's thinking. It's really thinking."
OTHER GUY: "No, it's like you've been awake for 68 hours"
GUY *hoarsely* "Ith tho amathiiiiiinnnnng"

Starring that guy who played Corky from Growing Pains or whatever the fuck that was

GUY: "I'm just like normal people you know."
GIRL: "Normal people don't think randomly splashing paint on a canvas is creativity."
GUY: "I'm just like Manhattan people you know."

And that girl that never mind

And the other guy who's more successful in life because he isn't completely deranged

OTHER GUY *drooling and staring at tv static*

Rated R for:
* conceptual challenges
* a complete lack of experimental control
* we're pretending being retarded is normal
* the film was computer generated. creators cannot be held liable for what might appear in front of you.

Re:Absurd

[smallfries]

And that somewhere else was probably also slashdot.

Ai or Random numbers?

[danknight48]

"Angelina chose the color of the walls, the textures, the ambient sound track."

fHueColour = iFloatRand(0.0f,360.0f);
Texture_Wall = iIntRand(0,10);
Music = iIntRand(0,5);
GameMode = iIntRand(0,10);

Ai, or, just basic random number generation?
Theres probably alot more under the hood. But, unless we can see how the code is written, it just looks like a random number based world generator to me.

Adventure Construction Set?

[Akratist]

I dunno if anyone else remembers it, but back in the 80s, Adventure Construction Set shipped with an option to generate an adventure from scratch, including the creation of new content (which, IIRC, was basically choosing some random values for things and rolling them into a new object). I obviously am not comparing the two -- this sounds considerably more advanced -- but the idea sounds the same and the results were probably about as interesting. That the AI relied on a pre-defined dictionary list of what is telling, too. Eventually, the understanding of consciousness will progress to the point where we can understand and analyze it in detail, but any AI is going to be dependent on that understanding before it is a true, complete, game production system.

Re:Absurd

[denmarkw00t]

If food induces memory loss, then our obesity problem in America is two-fold!

Hey Slashdot!

[mtrc]

I'm Mike, the chap behind this research. I'm glad to see a healthy dose of skepticism in the comments here! I just wanted to clear up a few points: first, I'm not claiming to have designed anything world-changing, this is just another step in the very early days of a very, very long road. Over the next few years I hope to get ANGELINA inventing game mechanics, designing graphical styles, commentating on its own developments, and producing a wider variety of games than ever before. But I hope you'll all still be asking questions and being critical, nevertheless. If you'd like to follow the project and let me know what you think of how things turn out, I blog at gamesbyangelina.org and I tweet @mtrc. Thanks for sharing the work!