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New AI Is Capable of Beating Humans At Doom (denofgeek.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Den of Geek UK: Two students at Carnegie Mellon University have designed an artificial intelligence program that is capable of beating human players in a deathmatch game of 1993's Doom. Guillaume Lample and Devendra Singh Chaplot spent four months developing a program capable of playing first-person shooter games. The program made its debut at VizDoom (an AI competition that centered around the classic shooter) where it took second place despite the fact that their creation managed to beat human participants. That's not the impressive part about this program, however. No, what's really impressive is how the AI learns to play. The creator's full write-up on the program (which is available here) notes that their AI "allows developing bots that play the game using the screen buffer." What that means is that the program learns by interpreting what is happening on the screen as opposed to following a pre-set series of command instructions alone. In other words, this AI learns to play in exactly the same way a human player learns to play. This theory has been explored practically before, but Doom is arguably the most complicated game a program fueled by that concept has been able to succeed at. The AI's creators have already confirmed that they will be moving on to Quake, which will be a much more interesting test of this technologies capabilities given that Quake presents a much more complex 3D environment.
All the way back in the original Quake there was a really nice learning AI written in quake C. One version allowed you to add practice bots to work on your deathmatch strategy.
Similar to the AI described in this article, the AI in this mod was ignorant of the map and had no preset patterns. It learned by doing. So as you began playing against them they were easy kills in the early rounds. They'd often just stand there and get shot. And they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
But they learned the map. And they learned your moves. And within a few rounds you'd be lucky to stay alive long. And finally they would learn enough to get you every time. They'd know which direction you were going to dodge before you did. And they kept track of every resource in the game and all of the respawn times, so they'd deny you any ammo or health by timing their movements perfectly to collect all spawns instantly.
It was very cool.
Then the guy who wrote it used his AI to replace the original game AI for all of the enemies. Wow. It made the game into an entirely different experience.
After about a half-level, the enemies would learn to avoid you, go out and recruit all the bad guys from the level and return in force. After a couple of more levels they'd learn to ambush, flank and surround you. They'd team up their fire, so you'd dodge a fireball to the left and strafe right into another fireball.
It was really interesting, but ultimately unplayable. It really gave me an appreciation of the level of "balancing" that goes into creating a proper game AI. It certainly isn't about the same thing as making a chess AI that can beat Kasparov. It requires a great deal of work to make the enemy realistic and interesting and difficult but ultimately beatable.