Game AI vs Traditional AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#11

Post by bane » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:50 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #4

It's a lot more important for AI for game characters to look real than to be real. It's easy to forget that the characters are there to support the fun of the game, and not to be fun to write or support the ego of the author. Incidentally, I thought the article was worth it for the mention of Infinite Mario and Galactic Arms Race alone-- I had not heard of those projects before.

It's like the Turing Test. You only have to be convinced that a human is on the other end, the AI on the other end doesn't actually have to think like a human does. It's a black box. How it does its thing is not important to the test.

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#12

Post by pmelendez » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:51 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #4

It's a lot more important for AI for game characters to look real than to be real. It's easy to forget that the characters are there to support the fun of the game, and not to be fun to write or support the ego of the author. Incidentally, I thought the article was worth it for the mention of Infinite Mario and Galactic Arms Race alone-- I had not heard of those projects before.

Granted.... However, a game character getting stuck in a corner or jumping to water without a reason is not much fun.

The following article illustrate the point:

http://aigamedev.com/open/article/bugs-caught-on-tape/

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#13

Post by vannevar » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:55 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #4

It's a lot more important for AI for game characters to look real than to be real. It's easy to forget that the characters are there to support the fun of the game, and not to be fun to write or support the ego of the author. Incidentally, I thought the article was worth it for the mention of Infinite Mario and Galactic Arms Race alone-- I had not heard of those projects before.

If you're interested in the intersection of game AI and 'real' AI, you might also want to check out NERO and all the work associated with it that has been done over the years: http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?nero . One of the original principals on NERO, Ken Stanley, went on to a professorship at the University of Central Florida, where his team produced Galactic Arms Race. They have a social game in the works called Petalz: http://petalzgame.com .

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#14

Post by a1k0n » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 5:56 PM UTC

unoti wrote: post #4

It's a lot more important for AI for game characters to look real than to be real. It's easy to forget that the characters are there to support the fun of the game, and not to be fun to write or support the ego of the author. Incidentally, I thought the article was worth it for the mention of Infinite Mario and Galactic Arms Race alone-- I had not heard of those projects before.

There was even an Infinite Mario AI contest in which you had to write a player which gets through as many levels of increasing difficulty as possible. The winning solution? A* of course: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8

(I had an also-ran entry in this contest that took 3rd place, but my solution wasn't significantly different than Robin's -- his was able to anticipate bullets firing but mine wasn't) Writeup: http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/GIC2009Compe...

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#15

Post by teamonkey » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

pmelendez wrote: post #10

rm999 wrote: post #2

I have an academic and professional background in traditional AI, and I've programmed an AI for a 3D video game I made in college. My traditional AI background is mostly in applying a wide variety of mainstream machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, SVMs, and regression, to real world problems like fraud and image detection. I was somewhat frustrated when building the game AI because the best solutio…

I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don't want that to happen. The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the beh…

To be fair, that designer is almost certainly correct. What benefit would your machine learning AI bring to a RTS game?

Things like the AI Director in Left4Dead are the more interesting applications, but even then it doesn't apply to every type of game.

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#16

Post by dkersten » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:16 PM UTC

pmelendez wrote: post #10

rm999 wrote: post #2

I have an academic and professional background in traditional AI, and I've programmed an AI for a 3D video game I made in college. My traditional AI background is mostly in applying a wide variety of mainstream machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, SVMs, and regression, to real world problems like fraud and image detection. I was somewhat frustrated when building the game AI because the best solutio…

I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don't want that to happen. The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the beh…

a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that "people" wouldn't care about a better AI

This makes me sad.. most RTS games have such terrible AI it often pains me to play them (and I love RTS games). Yeah yeah everything is moving towards online multiplayer, but I can't be the only person who would pay extra for a good single player experience, because often I really dislike the multiplayer experience and despite that I'm playing a lot of online games at the moment (Path of Exile, World of Tanks, League of Legends...), I usually prefer to play single player games and for this good AI is very important to me.

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#17

Post by superjesuspants » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:20 PM UTC

In single player games you have NPCs (non-player characters) and in multiplayer games you have bots (again, computer controlled characters). For instance, Team Fortress 2 has bots and Half-Life 2 has NPCs.

The difference is, bots behave and mimic actual human beings. They are bound by the same rules, and have the same controls and range of motion as human players. It's hard to distinguish the difference at times, granted they're far from perfect.

NPCs on the other hand, seem to be this "dumb" AI the article is referencing. They are intentionally made this way to serve a simple, singular purpose. They are either scripted for dialogue or just peppered throughout the map as meat puppets.

Why is it that we aren't seeing the bot approach to AI implanted into single player games? Why aren't we facing opponents who have their own missions/agendas in single player games, who are bound to the same controls/restrictions/exploits as yourself?

The current AI approach is to place enemies in hiding positions who want nothing more than to fight you to the death, without any purpose or reason.

I want AI that wants to do something, like another player would, that isn't concerned with me in particular, that has it's own goals/rewards instead of just fighting me or spouting dialogue at me.

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#18

Post by pmelendez » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:22 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #15

pmelendez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don't want that to happen. The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the beh…

To be fair, that designer is almost certainly correct. What benefit would your machine learning AI bring to a RTS game? Things like the AI Director in Left4Dead are the more interesting applications, but even then it doesn't apply to every type of game.

As a big fan of Age of Empires series I have to disagree, after a while the game (even in hardest mode) becomes predictable and after that the solo mode game is pretty much done. That doesn't happens on a LAN party because humans evolve their strategies as their opponents gets better and that increases the life cycle of the game in orders of magnitude. Which would be a very important economical incentive for an on-line game.

The thing is some research has to be done for this and the game industry is not very healthy to support research.

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#19

Post by radarsat1 » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:22 PM UTC

rm999 wrote: post #2

I have an academic and professional background in traditional AI, and I've programmed an AI for a 3D video game I made in college. My traditional AI background is mostly in applying a wide variety of mainstream machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, SVMs, and regression, to real world problems like fraud and image detection. I was somewhat frustrated when building the game AI because the best solutio…

But there are middle grounds between machine learning and simple state-machine approaches. Probabilistic state machines, online learning, (especially reinforcement learning), sound to me like they would be ideal in a game environment.

You want the character to act realistically according to his position in the world relative to the player? Define his observations, define his "reward", define a set of possible actions and state transitions, and let him go! I'm curious whether this approach is starting to be more used in game AI, it seems like a natural fit to me. Maybe some pre-training is needed so that it doesn't act randomly at first.

However, the idea of handicapping the AI by actually reducing his observations or his set of possible actions seems like a much more natural approach than more explicit handicapping methods.

Re: Game AI vs Traditional AI

#20

Post by radarsat1 » Wed, Sep 05, 2012, 6:32 PM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #15

pmelendez wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don't want that to happen. The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the beh…

To be fair, that designer is almost certainly correct. What benefit would your machine learning AI bring to a RTS game? Things like the AI Director in Left4Dead are the more interesting applications, but even then it doesn't apply to every type of game.

> What benefit would your machine learning AI bring to a RTS game?

Currently if I understand correctly, the traditional approach is to define a bunch of actions and figure out a realistic way to choose what action to perform, tuning a state machine carefully to make sure the character is realistic as well as beatable. I can imagine this takes a lot of work.

I think a huge benefit of machine learning could be to change the nature of the interface that the character designer has access to: instead of designing the character's internal states, probably relying on collaboration with a programmer, a designer could be tuning reward functions, which more naturally express the character's relationship with its environment.

In other words, the designer can now treat the character states as a black-box model, and instead worry directly about its input-output behavioural relationship, something I think an artist might have better intuition for compared to dealing with explicit state machines.

Being able to do design by means of tuning rewards and actions could help decouple design from programming, which I think would be hugely beneficial for industry.