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Artificial Intelligence Bests Humans At Classic Arcade Games
sciencehabit writes The dream of an artificially intelligent computer that can study a problem and gain expertise all on its own is now reality. A system debuted today by a team of Google researchers is not clever enough to perform surgery or drive a car safely, but it did master several dozen classic arcade games, including Space Invaders and Breakout. In many cases, it surpassed the best human players without ever observing how they play.
The best entries, however, didn't rely on AI, but on the fact that the RNG of the arcade game isn't random. Once the Asteroids-bot figured out the internal state of the RNG, it could basically use hyperspace to make targetted jumps (and never one that lead to the destruction of the ship), shoot at asteroids that haven't appeared yet and various other tricks. It was very impressive to watch one of these bots in action.
When Id released Quake C, this "you have to dumb down the AI" idea became very apparent. Someone wrote a replacement AI for the enemies that allowed them to learn and communicate. They had to follow the rules and physics of the game - so if they were within earshot they could communicate your position to each other, otherwise they couldn't.
The first couple of interactions would be pretty easy kills. Then one enemy would see that you were better armed and run away. That would be the last enemy you would see for a while. Then, when you were in a vulnerable position, the entire population of the level would ambush you in a coordinated attack. Game over. They were way, way, way too smart to be beaten. It was pretty fun to explore their learning capabilities and watch how they would win. But it didn't make for engaging gameplay, unless you are a complete masochist.
The same AI was applied to deathmatch player bots. They had no prior knowledge of the level, or strategies for playing the game. The first few kills were very easy as they figured out what to do. But as they learned your tendencies, they would very quickly evolve into a circle-strafe master. They also learned the map layout pretty quickly, including drop sites and periods for weapons and health. They would then time their circle-strafe to always be on the spawn site immediately as the health or ammo spawned. They would invariably win against even the best human players by monopolizing all of the supplies and winning a war of attrition. Very impressive to watch.
This "AI" program was very rudimentary, and it was already much too difficult for human players, despite being limited to the same "in game" knowledge and input capabilities as the human players. It makes perfect sense that the challenge and complexity of programming the AI for games mostly revolves around "dumbing down" the AI in a way that makes the enemies challenging and interesting, but also the right amount of "beatable".