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Game AI Pro

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Re: Game AI Pro

#31

Post by anarazel »

dmix wrote: post #29

> Unfortunately, the time between seeing a decision acted out and the actual act of making that decision can mean that all relevant information has already been discarded. Ideally if the entire game simu-lation could be rewound to the exact moment in time when the error occurred, it would make notoriously difficult problems to debug, trivial to understand why they occurred. > Game engines have typically made reproduc…

> Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from chapter 6]

rr comes pretty close. https://rr-project.org/

Re: Game AI Pro

#32

Post by dkersten »

nwienert wrote: post #30
grawprog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people eac…

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time. It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get any…

The cognitive biases linked in another comment and other general failure of our reasoning and logic (or even how our pattern matchers work too well, seeing patterns where there are none, looking at you, clown-shaped-cloud) tells me that there are still shortcuts, errors and less-than-elegant. We make mistakes in reason and thought all the time, sometimes fatally. I don't think that diminishes from how incredible the brain is and how adaptable and generalised its function is, I just don't believe that it doesn't take shortcuts given all of the errors we make.

I'm a hobbyist at sleight-of-hand magic and therefore like to read and watch lots of material on the matter (eg the book "Sleights of Mind" by neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, and science writer Sandra Blakeslee) and there are an incredibly many ways to fool or trick the brain into believing untruths, even obvious ones.

Re: Game AI Pro

#33

Post by dkersten »

Buttons840 wrote: post #28

I've been thinking a lot about trying to make an AI for a turn based 4X game. I believe an AI that could defeat the strongest human players in (for example) Civilization would be more impressive than AlphaStar and the Dota AIs. I think it might give the gaming industry a kick in the pants to start utilizing more advance AI techniques in general, since it seems almost all discussions of strong AI in games are dominate…

Having an AI defeat the strongest human players (without cheating) isn't often the hard part, its making it fun, believable, interesting or, indeed, beatable (its no fun if you can never ever win) is often the hard part. A perfectly minmaxing AI that makes perfect decisions isn't very interesting to players. Outsmarting players in interesting ways is, well, interesting, but just always playing the best move in any given scenario (like what deep blue did with its search-based "AI") can create perfect play if the search space is within the bounds of time/memory of the AI, but that's not very interesting to play against or watch.

Re: Game AI Pro

#34

Post by KenanSulayman »

Is this directly from the authors? If yes, I'm a bit shocked given the prices for the book when searching for ed 1, ed 2 and ed 3 on Google. Please add a donation button to the site.

I just finished the first four sections and I love it. Thanks a lot!

Re: Game AI Pro

#35

Post by grawprog »

nwienert wrote: post #30
grawprog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people eac…

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time. It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get any…

>It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy.

I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the way I learn and the way i've watched other people learn or the way i've seen people learn while i've been teaching them or training them. That and the general way everything kind of works. As amazing as everything in the world seems, when you break everything down to the smallest components, they all rely on the same skills and techniques we've been using since we were picking berries and hunting mammoths. The materials, accuracy and scales of our work have changed and improved dramatically, but fundamentally, most of what we do can be traced back to the same old things we've always done. We're just really good at building on layers and layers of things and applying things and knowledge to novel concepts and ideas.

Take music for an example, we just keep making the same music over and over and over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the point where most people don't realize they've been listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.

Re: Game AI Pro

#37

Post by nwienert »

dkersten wrote: post #32
nwienert wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time. It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get any…

The cognitive biases linked in another comment and other general failure of our reasoning and logic (or even how our pattern matchers work too well, seeing patterns where there are none, looking at you, clown-shaped-cloud) tells me that there are still shortcuts, errors and less-than-elegant. We make mistakes in reason and thought all the time, sometimes fatally. I don't think that diminishes from how incredible the…

Sleights of hand are not proof the brain is failing in any way. That our visual processing is limited is not a sign that the brain is somehow taping together systems in poor ways.

Cognitive biases were also incredibly exaggerated and if you’ve read into the replication crisis and various pushback Kahneman has gotten on his studies you’ll find much of what we call cognitive bias was wrong or exaggerated.

That we figure out super inventive ways to trick others into thinking we’re not smart is just more proof of how clever we really can be.

A great example is loss aversion which, if you read the debate around, is a totally smart strategy given we have absorption barriers.

That I pay attention to things in a certain way that allows magicians to fool me in predictable ways doesn’t mean our brains are failing in some way - it means they are making a trade off that helped us survive better with the given processing power we have. But that trade off is almost certainly the smart trade off, and labeling it “kludgy” is lazy thinking.

Re: Game AI Pro

#38

Post by nwienert »

grawprog wrote: post #35
nwienert wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time. It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get any…

>It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the way I learn and the way i've watched other people learn or the way i've seen people learn while i've been teaching them or training them. That and the general way everything kind of works. As amazing as everything in the world seems, when you break everything down to the smalles…

Your music example is just wrong. Music has changed consistently, constantly and honestly miraculously and in such beautiful ways over the years. From all the great classical geniuses to jazz to the extraordinary advances in sound design and mixing, avante garde and experimental new styles that show up year after year, I mean that’s your example? Sorry, but disagree, strongly.

Re: Game AI Pro

#39

Post by joenot443 »

grawprog wrote: post #35
nwienert wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time. It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get any…

>It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the way I learn and the way i've watched other people learn or the way i've seen people learn while i've been teaching them or training them. That and the general way everything kind of works. As amazing as everything in the world seems, when you break everything down to the smalles…

> we just keep making the same music over and over and over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the point where most people don't realize they've been listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.

What do you mean by this? Oftentimes I see people reaching the conclusion that because a lot of modern music is built around the same major scales and largely homogenous chord progressions, it must be the same, but this simply isn't the case.

Re: Game AI Pro

#40

Post by ben_w »

MereInterest wrote: post #23
MAXPOOL wrote: post #5

I am just an NPC until I get coffee. For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It's cheap tricks and obviously fake but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a new trick you want to try in real life. Marvin Minsky once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge." If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick be…

> If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Wikipedia has an interesting list of cognitive biases [1]. Going through these, I tend to think of all of them as heuristic failures, where those shortcuts and incomplete solutions are pushed to edge case…

I’d go further and conjecture that our cognitive biases are necessary, that the “theoretically perfect” models that these biases are compared against when being called biases are actually spherical cows in a vacuum.

However, I’m not a neuroscientist, and my knowledge and use of A.I. is limited to hobby projects.

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