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I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can b

I suspect this will eventually lead to AI as a service for games. Rather than build a terrible AI that delays a game by months, approaching a company that can build a decent AI initially which gets better overtime would probably be ideal and create better experiences. Im curious if a startup can be built from this.

doikor 10y ago
Is it harder to make an AI that is mediocre at playing the game vs one that is good? That is the main issue with making good AIs for games now. We want AIs (if you can call them that) that play kinda like humans but worse then the player as the player wants to win. Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Starcraft (RTS and strategy games in general. For FPS games it really isn't so important as you can just increase or decrease the accuracy and hp of the enemies)
- Voloskaya 10y ago
  Having checkpoints along the way as you train your model could be a good way to allow fine-grained level selection. I guess :)
  - LesZedCB 10y ago
    That would be funny. The difficulty slider changes to "How many hours of playtime" instead of easy, medium, hard. Actually it could even just scale it automatically based on a metric like steam hours played. that would be awesome.
  - aero142 10y ago
    I don't think so. Many of the fun things AIs do in games is attack at different stages of the game. They send a small force at the beginning, and then a little larger force a few minutes later, and then a big attack at the end. No AI trying to win would end up at this strategy. You would have to define the fun goals and have the AI train on that for it's success criteria.
- dimino 10y ago
  Probably not, to be honest. For a game like chess, the challenge is that there are so few things you can actually do. Inefficiencies aren't really a thing, every single move has a semi-discrete value. Starcraft however has all kinds of minor inefficiencies you can build in. You could inconsistently build workers, you could occasionally supply cap, your army comps can vary in sophistication level, etc.
- stale2002 10y ago
  Well, starcraft AIs aren't particularly good. Any player who has completed the single player campaign could beat all the AIs that came with the game that didn't cheat. And a player in the top 20 percent could beat any AI that has ever been created. AIs are really in an abysmal state for RTSes.
  - cosarara97 10y ago
    What about APM? Doesn't the speed at which the AI can input commands give it a big advantage?
    - sillysaurus3 10y ago
      It's like saying that a Go AI would have a huge advantage because it can move instantly, giving the opponent no time to think. Perhaps it contributes, but strategy is far more important. See "The Marginal Advantage," an essay from the famous Starcraft player Day9: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-gaming-article-by-day http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-...
      - cosarara97 10y ago
        Even if you add time control, Go is a turn based game. You have your own turn to think, unlike in a RTS game.
        sillysaurus3 10y ago
        Sort of. Go players are limited to around ~2 hours per game and around ~1 minute per move: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-standard-time-limits-in-Go-games https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-standard-time-limits-in-G... I meant to say that strategy trumps mechanics. Mechanical proficiency is necessary but not sufficient.
      - taneq 10y ago
        This essay reminds me very much of the "Playing to Win" series by David Sirlin: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ It's also worth noting that AlphaGo optimizes its perceived chance of winning the game, rather than its score. It "gets complacent" and mostly plays very conservatively the moment it's ahead on points, because it doesn't care about margins, only about win/loss.
- kurthr 10y ago
  I think it's really important to realize is that a game AI isn't really there to try to win, or maybe even to "convincingly" beat you the same way a human is. Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun", but that's pretty hard to measure and people are so different. It's a really hard optimization process. One commonality, it seems, is that players want to get better at the game. Perhaps, an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play, and reduce errors would be an easier problem. So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at... and what the user can improve at fastest! That is something nicely measurable, which you might use to train an AI. Then, if/when people play against other human players they are as strong as they can be... often an FPS goal.
  - visarga 10y ago
    > So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at. That's how MOOCs should function, too.
  - pizza 10y ago
    You could use some kind of library of example "mistakes" made by very-high-level players to identify when lower-rank players are making similar errors; then point out to the user how everyone else who made that mistake 'updated' their behavior.
  - Fang_ 10y ago
    >an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play Wouldn't you be able to do mutual training that way? By mutating the AI's "strategy" only after losses, the player would continuously need to figure out a weakness in the AI's game-plan. And the AI tries to evolve its strategy every time it loses.
  - oelmekki 10y ago
    > Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun" This is actually a way more interesting problem to solve, for the gaming industry. Beating games is cool for industries where gaming is not the final problem (autonomous cars, various decision making, etc). But if AIs are to be exploited by gaming industry, it needs to learn things like : "is the user bored?", "what usually triggers new interest?", "how should difficulty be adjusted given current way the user is playing?", etc.
- noiv 10y ago
  I think it's about options for players, some are strong others fresh and both want to choose an AI to their likings. Sometimes they are in the mood to get beat maybe to learn new tactics and occasionally just a victim to fight frustration. What wrong with a strength option? I'd include an unbeatable entry in any case.
- tedajax 10y ago
  To some extent it depends on the game. First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. Try beating the last "boss" in quake 3 on nightmare difficulty. A game like Starcraft relies much more on decision making that raw 3d math calculations and that makes making a decent AI pretty difficult without giving it advantages like extra resources or vision. That said, even though a game like Quake is easier to write an AI for, top players can still be top level AIs with superior reasoning about using the map and timing power up spawns and such.
  - DCoder 10y ago
    > First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. The Worms series is also notorious for this. Their AI targeting seems to flip between "clueless" and "godlike", with very little middle ground. E.g. https://youtu.be/gqPITW04vRQ?t=1m20s https://youtu.be/gqPITW04vRQ?t=1m20s
- jandrese 10y ago
  It depends. AIs can do some things much better than nearly all humans. Twiddly little micromanagement for example. Total Annihilation (and it's successors like Supreme Commander) do this. The AI will send out a constant stream of micromanaged harassers constantly order to annoy the human opponent to death. Where the AIs tend to be very bad is in long term thinking and overall strategy. Blizzard's AI in Starcraft generally plays like a slightly more aggressive but novice human. It's more fun than the TA AI, but not terribly strong once you understand the game mechanics.
  - louithethrid 10y ago
    Some AIs for the Spring RTS Engine had this too. The funny thing is though- harrassment doesent scale. In these Exponential Economy type of games, the harassment only works as long as the macro-strategy is unable to take off. After a certain treshold, you can micro all the funny dances in the world- but the wave of enemys is going to carry this surfer to the shores end.
- totalZero 10y ago
  I bet you could run an analysis of "move quality" for the human player, find out where the moves he is making would rank in a list of possible moves sorted by value of the AI's quality function, and select the same-percentile moves for the computer AI to make (from its available moves).
- fweespeech 10y ago
  > Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Starcraft (RTS and strategy games in general. For FPS games it really isn't so important as you can just increase or decrease the accuracy and hp of the enemies) It is actually about making a good AI. Civ 6 or SC2, in both cases they simply "cheat" by providing multipliers to the AI in order to solve its limitations. The basic function is largely the same. Providing the AI with cheat codes is not "good" AI. A good AI design would remove the need for such arbitrary advantages that are out of context for human players and leads to weird issues.
- clearf 10y ago
  I'm not sure that accuracy/HP are the right things to tweak. I've always wanted to be "surprised," in an unscripted way, by AI enemies in FPS and RTS games.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    One game experimented with smart enemy units that could sneak up on a player and attack them from behind, or outflank them. The players hated it and assumed the computer was cheating and just spawning enemies behind them. The same is sort of true in RTS games. The new rerelease of age of empires 2 has vastly improved AI that was developed by modders. Lots of players thought it was just cheating. But in general it has been very well received. I think players can get used to good AI. They've just been trained to expect stupid AI that cheats.
    - ygra 10y ago
      For the vast majority of players it's probably irrelevant whether the AI cheats or not. The goal is not to play fair and beat the human usually, but to put up a good fight and make things challenging and, most importantly, fun for the human. Of course, competitive and professional players have different expectations or requirements in that regard. Still, AI in games is mostly a trade-off. It usually can't take too much resources (because it usually has to run on the same machine the human is playing on), it has to be believable and fun to play against. This usually rules out too fancy algorithms and approaches with dubious returns.
      - Houshalter 10y ago
        I think the majority of players would prefer AIs that are challenging through better strategy and tactics, rather than just being bullet sponges or having better aim. People also get frustrated when the computer wins through cheating, rather than actually being better.
jonnycowboy 10y ago
the real question of course would be how to train the AI to have varying levels of "expertise" (ie: penalize if score is too high)
- the8472 10y ago
  For realtime games, maybe just add a little forced think-time for each action? You could even adjust that dynamically it's necessary anyway to prevent it from having godlike micro.
hacker_9 10y ago
AI is terrible in games because it's literally such a hard problem. Thinking like a human, working in a group, overcoming obstacles and reacting to dynamic behaviour from the human player. This is far harder that Go which has 100x simpler rules. Additionally they had a mega ton of training data to feed into the Go model to begin with, which a game won't have as the data structures will all be different under the hood.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 10y ago
  The reason they picked this challenge is to work on problems where the whole state of the game is not immediately accessible (games of partial information, as opposed to chess and Go). Compared to AlphaGo, it is much more similar to the situations humans encounter in daily life.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
You mean like MASA, who've been around for at least 15 years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkbNzzZEU9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkbNzzZEU9g
thedangler 10y ago
I thought a neat way to make NPCs less dumb in games would be to let other players (internet connection required) to be the NPCs. They would have limited coverage area maybe set tasks and restrictions and let them fight a real person to move onto the next part of the game. Basically set up a queue of player and what NPC character to play and when a user gets to that part of the game where NPC needs to load, you jump in and play. When the NPC dies you the game (scene) and get put back in the queue of playable NPCs.
- bduerst 10y ago
  I'm picturing a Westworld-esque job task on mechanical turk.
- Joof 10y ago
  It's difficult to make fun because the AI are typically intended to lose, but it's cool when it happens.
- slavik81 10y ago
  You're storming the beaches of Normandy. You duck behind cover. Suddenly a shot rings out. You're dead. The kill cam reveals you were killed by a human-controlled enemy, standing on a seagull in the skies above. [1] Unfortunately, humans will find advantages that shouldn't be used in any sort of game that tries to build a believable world. That isn't to say it's a bad idea. You'd just have to design the game with human enemies in mind. I was very interested in The Crossing [2], which incorporated that of mechanic. Unfortunately, it was canceled. :( [1] Not a made-up problem. https://youtu.be/UfZFHdywYLA https://youtu.be/UfZFHdywYLA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_(video_game)
kakarot 10y ago
There are many game AI specialists that make good money with freelancing and consultation
reilly3000 10y ago
Isn't most game ai based on FSMs? I'm curious about how a deep learning approach would work against a large set of players with varying skill levels.
reilly3000 10y ago
Isn't most game ai based on FSMs? I'm curious about how a deep learning approach would work against a large set of players with varying skill levels.
bduerst 10y ago
The I/O with the hardest part. How would you scale for games with different inputs and outputs?
cableshaft 10y ago
I've been to the Game Developer's Conference (once) before. Believe me, there have been startups that have provided A.I. services for years (it was kind of like the equivalent of the Havok engine for physics, you had to implement it into your game). I don't know how well used they are, but I remember them being mentioned at one of the lectures about A.I. that I attended. They had tables and swag, too. I don't remember their names.
- formula1 10y ago
  Thats really interesting. Im curious why they havent been more popular. Were they heavilly focused on fps's?
  - quantumpotato_ 10y ago
    In previous years I've seen a lot of AI tech for action-games -- not neccessiarly FPS but shooter in a flat world with obstacles. Eg. marking objects for cover, marking positions to defend from etc. Doesn't quite apply to a mario style game
  - lenocinor 10y ago
    There are a lot of problems, but mainly I think it boils down to game people, like a lot of programmers, wanting to write something themselves. You'll always understand it better, and it'll be perfectly tailored to your problem. Unless the problem is REALLY hard and takes a long time coding tedious things, they'd rather just do it themselves, since coding something is always more fun than figuring out someone else's code. Also, out of my experience with many different fields of programming, game programmers seem to want to write more of the stuff themselves than most. This would be another huge subject to go into, but I think the biggest reason is that historically you couldn't ever really punt on performance in games, and you had to tweak everything to your problem. If your game ran slowly or looked bad, people just wouldn't buy it.
andbberger 10y ago
It can! That is exactly was Deepmind was started to be!
rezashirazian 10y ago
I hope it leads to that as opposed to AI as a secretary of defence.
golergka 10y ago
Most games don't need this. Smoke and mirrors work a lot better than honest AI to create an illusion of intelligence, and it's much easier to change game mechanics and balance with a simpler AI.

doikor 10y ago

Is it harder to make an AI that is mediocre at playing the game vs one that is good? That is the main issue with making good AIs for games now. We want AIs (if you can call them that) that play kinda like humans but worse then the player as the player wants to win. Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Starcraft (RTS and strategy games in general. For FPS games it really isn't so important as you can just increase or decrease the accuracy and hp of the enemies)

Voloskaya 10y ago
Having checkpoints along the way as you train your model could be a good way to allow fine-grained level selection. I guess :)
- LesZedCB 10y ago
  That would be funny. The difficulty slider changes to "How many hours of playtime" instead of easy, medium, hard. Actually it could even just scale it automatically based on a metric like steam hours played. that would be awesome.
- aero142 10y ago
  I don't think so. Many of the fun things AIs do in games is attack at different stages of the game. They send a small force at the beginning, and then a little larger force a few minutes later, and then a big attack at the end. No AI trying to win would end up at this strategy. You would have to define the fun goals and have the AI train on that for it's success criteria.
dimino 10y ago
Probably not, to be honest. For a game like chess, the challenge is that there are so few things you can actually do. Inefficiencies aren't really a thing, every single move has a semi-discrete value. Starcraft however has all kinds of minor inefficiencies you can build in. You could inconsistently build workers, you could occasionally supply cap, your army comps can vary in sophistication level, etc.
stale2002 10y ago
Well, starcraft AIs aren't particularly good. Any player who has completed the single player campaign could beat all the AIs that came with the game that didn't cheat. And a player in the top 20 percent could beat any AI that has ever been created. AIs are really in an abysmal state for RTSes.
- cosarara97 10y ago
  What about APM? Doesn't the speed at which the AI can input commands give it a big advantage?
  - sillysaurus3 10y ago
    It's like saying that a Go AI would have a huge advantage because it can move instantly, giving the opponent no time to think. Perhaps it contributes, but strategy is far more important. See "The Marginal Advantage," an essay from the famous Starcraft player Day9: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-gaming-article-by-day http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-...
    - cosarara97 10y ago
      Even if you add time control, Go is a turn based game. You have your own turn to think, unlike in a RTS game.
      - sillysaurus3 10y ago
        Sort of. Go players are limited to around ~2 hours per game and around ~1 minute per move: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-standard-time-limits-in-Go-games https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-standard-time-limits-in-G... I meant to say that strategy trumps mechanics. Mechanical proficiency is necessary but not sufficient.
    - taneq 10y ago
      This essay reminds me very much of the "Playing to Win" series by David Sirlin: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/ It's also worth noting that AlphaGo optimizes its perceived chance of winning the game, rather than its score. It "gets complacent" and mostly plays very conservatively the moment it's ahead on points, because it doesn't care about margins, only about win/loss.
kurthr 10y ago
I think it's really important to realize is that a game AI isn't really there to try to win, or maybe even to "convincingly" beat you the same way a human is. Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun", but that's pretty hard to measure and people are so different. It's a really hard optimization process. One commonality, it seems, is that players want to get better at the game. Perhaps, an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play, and reduce errors would be an easier problem. So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at... and what the user can improve at fastest! That is something nicely measurable, which you might use to train an AI. Then, if/when people play against other human players they are as strong as they can be... often an FPS goal.
- visarga 10y ago
  > So far we mostly do this using heuristics of gradually increasing difficulty, but it should really depend on what the player is weakest at. That's how MOOCs should function, too.
- pizza 10y ago
  You could use some kind of library of example "mistakes" made by very-high-level players to identify when lower-rank players are making similar errors; then point out to the user how everyone else who made that mistake 'updated' their behavior.
- Fang_ 10y ago
  >an AI that TEACHES the user to improve their play Wouldn't you be able to do mutual training that way? By mutating the AI's "strategy" only after losses, the player would continuously need to figure out a weakness in the AI's game-plan. And the AI tries to evolve its strategy every time it loses.
- oelmekki 10y ago
  > Perhaps you could train an AI to make the game more "fun" This is actually a way more interesting problem to solve, for the gaming industry. Beating games is cool for industries where gaming is not the final problem (autonomous cars, various decision making, etc). But if AIs are to be exploited by gaming industry, it needs to learn things like : "is the user bored?", "what usually triggers new interest?", "how should difficulty be adjusted given current way the user is playing?", etc.
noiv 10y ago
I think it's about options for players, some are strong others fresh and both want to choose an AI to their likings. Sometimes they are in the mood to get beat maybe to learn new tactics and occasionally just a victim to fight frustration. What wrong with a strength option? I'd include an unbeatable entry in any case.
tedajax 10y ago
To some extent it depends on the game. First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. Try beating the last "boss" in quake 3 on nightmare difficulty. A game like Starcraft relies much more on decision making that raw 3d math calculations and that makes making a decent AI pretty difficult without giving it advantages like extra resources or vision. That said, even though a game like Quake is easier to write an AI for, top players can still be top level AIs with superior reasoning about using the map and timing power up spawns and such.
- DCoder 10y ago
  > First person shooters can have super accurate AIs that are really frustrating to play against. The Worms series is also notorious for this. Their AI targeting seems to flip between "clueless" and "godlike", with very little middle ground. E.g. https://youtu.be/gqPITW04vRQ?t=1m20s https://youtu.be/gqPITW04vRQ?t=1m20s
jandrese 10y ago
It depends. AIs can do some things much better than nearly all humans. Twiddly little micromanagement for example. Total Annihilation (and it's successors like Supreme Commander) do this. The AI will send out a constant stream of micromanaged harassers constantly order to annoy the human opponent to death. Where the AIs tend to be very bad is in long term thinking and overall strategy. Blizzard's AI in Starcraft generally plays like a slightly more aggressive but novice human. It's more fun than the TA AI, but not terribly strong once you understand the game mechanics.
- louithethrid 10y ago
  Some AIs for the Spring RTS Engine had this too. The funny thing is though- harrassment doesent scale. In these Exponential Economy type of games, the harassment only works as long as the macro-strategy is unable to take off. After a certain treshold, you can micro all the funny dances in the world- but the wave of enemys is going to carry this surfer to the shores end.
totalZero 10y ago
I bet you could run an analysis of "move quality" for the human player, find out where the moves he is making would rank in a list of possible moves sorted by value of the AI's quality function, and select the same-percentile moves for the computer AI to make (from its available moves).
fweespeech 10y ago
> Making an AI for game isn't about making a good AI. It is about making an AI that loses in a convincing manner. This is especially try for games like Starcraft (RTS and strategy games in general. For FPS games it really isn't so important as you can just increase or decrease the accuracy and hp of the enemies) It is actually about making a good AI. Civ 6 or SC2, in both cases they simply "cheat" by providing multipliers to the AI in order to solve its limitations. The basic function is largely the same. Providing the AI with cheat codes is not "good" AI. A good AI design would remove the need for such arbitrary advantages that are out of context for human players and leads to weird issues.
clearf 10y ago
I'm not sure that accuracy/HP are the right things to tweak. I've always wanted to be "surprised," in an unscripted way, by AI enemies in FPS and RTS games.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  One game experimented with smart enemy units that could sneak up on a player and attack them from behind, or outflank them. The players hated it and assumed the computer was cheating and just spawning enemies behind them. The same is sort of true in RTS games. The new rerelease of age of empires 2 has vastly improved AI that was developed by modders. Lots of players thought it was just cheating. But in general it has been very well received. I think players can get used to good AI. They've just been trained to expect stupid AI that cheats.
  - ygra 10y ago
    For the vast majority of players it's probably irrelevant whether the AI cheats or not. The goal is not to play fair and beat the human usually, but to put up a good fight and make things challenging and, most importantly, fun for the human. Of course, competitive and professional players have different expectations or requirements in that regard. Still, AI in games is mostly a trade-off. It usually can't take too much resources (because it usually has to run on the same machine the human is playing on), it has to be believable and fun to play against. This usually rules out too fancy algorithms and approaches with dubious returns.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      I think the majority of players would prefer AIs that are challenging through better strategy and tactics, rather than just being bullet sponges or having better aim. People also get frustrated when the computer wins through cheating, rather than actually being better.

jonnycowboy 10y ago

the real question of course would be how to train the AI to have varying levels of "expertise" (ie: penalize if score is too high)

the8472 10y ago
For realtime games, maybe just add a little forced think-time for each action? You could even adjust that dynamically it's necessary anyway to prevent it from having godlike micro.

hacker_9 10y ago

AI is terrible in games because it's literally such a hard problem. Thinking like a human, working in a group, overcoming obstacles and reacting to dynamic behaviour from the human player. This is far harder that Go which has 100x simpler rules. Additionally they had a mega ton of training data to feed into the Go model to begin with, which a game won't have as the data structures will all be different under the hood.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
visarga 10y ago
The reason they picked this challenge is to work on problems where the whole state of the game is not immediately accessible (games of partial information, as opposed to chess and Go). Compared to AlphaGo, it is much more similar to the situations humans encounter in daily life.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

You mean like MASA, who've been around for at least 15 years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkbNzzZEU9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkbNzzZEU9g

thedangler 10y ago

I thought a neat way to make NPCs less dumb in games would be to let other players (internet connection required) to be the NPCs. They would have limited coverage area maybe set tasks and restrictions and let them fight a real person to move onto the next part of the game. Basically set up a queue of player and what NPC character to play and when a user gets to that part of the game where NPC needs to load, you jump in and play. When the NPC dies you the game (scene) and get put back in the queue of playable NPCs.

bduerst 10y ago
I'm picturing a Westworld-esque job task on mechanical turk.
Joof 10y ago
It's difficult to make fun because the AI are typically intended to lose, but it's cool when it happens.
slavik81 10y ago
You're storming the beaches of Normandy. You duck behind cover. Suddenly a shot rings out. You're dead. The kill cam reveals you were killed by a human-controlled enemy, standing on a seagull in the skies above. [1] Unfortunately, humans will find advantages that shouldn't be used in any sort of game that tries to build a believable world. That isn't to say it's a bad idea. You'd just have to design the game with human enemies in mind. I was very interested in The Crossing [2], which incorporated that of mechanic. Unfortunately, it was canceled. :( [1] Not a made-up problem. https://youtu.be/UfZFHdywYLA https://youtu.be/UfZFHdywYLA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crossing_(video_game)

kakarot 10y ago

There are many game AI specialists that make good money with freelancing and consultation

reilly3000 10y ago

Isn't most game ai based on FSMs? I'm curious about how a deep learning approach would work against a large set of players with varying skill levels.

reilly3000 10y ago

Isn't most game ai based on FSMs? I'm curious about how a deep learning approach would work against a large set of players with varying skill levels.

bduerst 10y ago

The I/O with the hardest part. How would you scale for games with different inputs and outputs?

cableshaft 10y ago

I've been to the Game Developer's Conference (once) before. Believe me, there have been startups that have provided A.I. services for years (it was kind of like the equivalent of the Havok engine for physics, you had to implement it into your game). I don't know how well used they are, but I remember them being mentioned at one of the lectures about A.I. that I attended. They had tables and swag, too. I don't remember their names.

formula1 10y ago
Thats really interesting. Im curious why they havent been more popular. Were they heavilly focused on fps's?
- quantumpotato_ 10y ago
  In previous years I've seen a lot of AI tech for action-games -- not neccessiarly FPS but shooter in a flat world with obstacles. Eg. marking objects for cover, marking positions to defend from etc. Doesn't quite apply to a mario style game
- lenocinor 10y ago
  There are a lot of problems, but mainly I think it boils down to game people, like a lot of programmers, wanting to write something themselves. You'll always understand it better, and it'll be perfectly tailored to your problem. Unless the problem is REALLY hard and takes a long time coding tedious things, they'd rather just do it themselves, since coding something is always more fun than figuring out someone else's code. Also, out of my experience with many different fields of programming, game programmers seem to want to write more of the stuff themselves than most. This would be another huge subject to go into, but I think the biggest reason is that historically you couldn't ever really punt on performance in games, and you had to tweak everything to your problem. If your game ran slowly or looked bad, people just wouldn't buy it.

andbberger 10y ago

It can! That is exactly was Deepmind was started to be!

rezashirazian 10y ago

I hope it leads to that as opposed to AI as a secretary of defence.

golergka 10y ago

Most games don't need this. Smoke and mirrors work a lot better than honest AI to create an illusion of intelligence, and it's much easier to change game mechanics and balance with a simpler AI.