17 ms·

Game AI Pro

389 points by SimplyUseless 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
coder1001 7y ago
Thank! Nice to see people releasing this kind of material for free!
m3kw9 7y ago
Yeah this is awesome
MAXPOOL 7y ago
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 berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Combining many tricks together can create illusion of generality that is very convincing.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  The kludginess of brains is textbook neuroscience, from instincts to reflexes, to illusions and more. Indeed, Game AI puts the "Game" first -- as it should for Games, but to the detriment of anyone who cares more about AI and wants Games to be a fun place to study AI. If we split Game AI into "problem solving" (like pathfinding) and "opponent personality", then we can recover a lot of good AI that generalizes beyond games, without being misled by the parts that only useful for tricking people in a toy environment.
- MereInterest 7y ago
  > 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 cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
  - ben_w 7y ago
    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.
    - MiracleUser 7y ago
      Necessary to what end? It could be necessary to maximize survival for the species, but that doesnt make it necessary to maximize survival for an individual. It's perfectly possible our heuristics are muddied beyond necessity in order to generate variety in action, so as to reduce risk to the unknown for the species - even though it would cause a minority of individuals to consistently make sub-optimal choices. From a speculative standpoint, it's easy to find examples of people doing things that we consider 'stupid' but it pays off because of some unlikely event occurring in coincidence. Reality has a lot of unknowns. There is no perfect model that could account for that. It's possible being hyper-intelligent (beyond our current ability) is (or was) a disadvantage for the species
      - orestarod 7y ago
        Take depression and nihilism for example. Great intelligence can overcome the very drives that makes us want to keep living - which is an arbitrary cause, and an extremely tedious activity.
- nwienert 7y ago
  I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks at all. Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks” were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked. I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just don’t really know well yet.
  - robotresearcher 7y ago
    > I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.
    - nwienert 7y ago
      Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things - it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked. Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.
      - grawprog 7y ago
        >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 each with their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.
- echelon 7y ago
  > Marvin Minsky Can we still cite Marvin Minsky in the AI field given the allegations that have arisen regarding his relationship with Epstein and sex trafficking? We should find better luminaries. I'm all for redemption and I hope Stallman comes around and apologizes, but Minsky went to the grave with whatever happened.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - echelon 7y ago
    Instead of downvoting me without a stated reason, can you provide a refutation? I'm open to changing my mind, but this is where it stands right now. I think we need to choose those we hold in esteem.
- Reedx 7y ago
  > evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers Yeah, that's the thing - the brain and body evolved for a much different environment than the one we find ourselves in today. So some aspects which used to be advantages are now disadvantages that we have to actively manage with things like exercise, healthy diet, meditation. Which the brain fights against.
The_mboga_real 7y ago
Great work! Have you considered looking into human gaming practices that border on the unethical and unfair?
thebrain 7y ago
Download it all with wget -r -A.pdf http://www.gameaipro.com/ http://www.gameaipro.com/ wget -r -A.zip http://www.gameaipro.com/ http://www.gameaipro.com/
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  That seems a bit rude to me, especially since they a) sell PDF ebooks and b) explicitly say that you are not supposed to re-upload the content elsewhere.
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    Why? They've made this all available, why is grabbing it all in increase your own convenience (eg offline reading, searching) rude?
    - fxtentacle 7y ago
      Because when you actually read it, you will download 1 article per 30 minutes. If you batch-download all of their content now, you'll create much more peak load and, hence, costs for them.
      - faitswulff 7y ago
        On the other hand, if you download it all at once you aren't constantly reloading a page when you get back to it and you aren't limited to reading it when you're online. I do see the point you're making, though I think it depends on the author's perspective.
      - stevehawk 7y ago
        so he should seed a torrent instead of a wget command?
      - oliwarner 7y ago
        You can use --limit-rate=500k if you want to limit the bandwidth you're consuming. And load does not translate to cost for everybody. If you saturate the connection to my VPS, I don't pay more, it just gets slower for everybody in contention. I can spin up mirrors but if I'm offering a free resource like this, I'd be more likely to limit the bandwidth-per-client-IP or just actively let it run slow. They could even limit the bandwith to the subdirectory with... location /download/ { limit_conn addr 1; limit_rate 50k; }
fxtentacle 7y ago
What a generous gift :) And even though they gave a talk about in in 2015, their "Simplest AI Trick in the Book" is still not implemented by some games released nowadays. In case you don't know it, it's: 0.2s reaction time for aiming + 0.4s reaction time for yes/no decisions + additional delay for ambiguity, surprise, or limited visibility I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. Just seeing your opponent taking a moment to think makes whatever it is they do so much more convincing.
Jahak 7y ago
Thank you very much!
bdickason 7y ago
Very cool. I always expect a link like this to either be some super basic examples (e.g. how to implement flocking) or articles detailing techniques used in games from ~20 years ago. Very cool how recent and modern these are (along with super reputable authors)
spmealin 7y ago
What a cool and useful resource. Unfortunately, all of the pdf files are inaccessible to assistive technology (such as screen readers).
- bmn__ 7y ago
  What makes you think so? I tested book 3 chapter 1 with Okular and Festival plugin, works fine.
hesdeadjim 7y ago
Love these books. Two techniques I’ve found hugely valuable in practice are utility-based AI and flow field pathfinding/goal seeking.
Buttons840 7y ago
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 dominated by apologists explaining why it's not practical. Just one example of strong AI in a successful game would change the industry. After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of dumbing them down in fun ways.
- dkersten 7y ago
  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.
  - baobabKoodaa 7y ago
    Have you played Civilization? The challenge of making a legitimate, human-beating AI, is near insurmountable.
- Namrog84 7y ago
  > After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of dumbing them down in fun ways An artificially handicapped or limited smart ai in video games is often obvious and not fun.
  - Buttons840 7y ago
    I don't know about that, I much prefer playing chess video games against an artificially limited AI. Granted you did say "often", and I agree this is the exception. Starting with an AI that is weaker than human players, and then artificially limiting it even further does not produce a great AI. Although, some players still choose to play against these easiest of AIs. I believe starting with an AI that is far stronger than any human, and then artificially limiting it will be fun. This is a fundamentally different situation. This is like a chess engine, no human can hope to win without some artificial limitations on the AI. This is a type of AI we have never experience outside of a few abstract board games like chess. I look forward to seeing AIs like this come to 4X style games such as Civilization.
dmix 7y ago
> 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 reproducing these types of problems easier using deterministic playback methods (Dickinson 2001), where the entire state of the game simu-lation can jump back in time and resimulate the same problem over and over (Llopis 2008). Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from chapter 6]
- anarazel 7y ago
  > Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from chapter 6] rr comes pretty close. https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/
KenanSulayman 7y ago
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!
- runevault 7y ago
  They always do this when the next version of the book is close to coming out. The first 2 have been available for free for a while. It is expected with this that the 4th is coming soon.
SergeAx 7y ago
Shouldn't it have (2017) in title?
- SloopJon 7y ago
  "All chapters are available to download as of September 2019."
  - SergeAx 7y ago
    As Hacker News is mostly informational resource, it is important when the information was produced, not when it became free of charge.
syspec 7y ago
The RVO chapter, and that concept I general is an amazing one because they really created a method for 2 autonomous characters avoiding collisions on a natural way - with code that is easy to understand
mottosso 7y ago
Does anyone know the reason why they suddenly became free?

Game AI Pro

389 points by SimplyUseless 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

coder1001 7y ago

Thank! Nice to see people releasing this kind of material for free!

m3kw9 7y ago

Yeah this is awesome

MAXPOOL 7y ago

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 berries and avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Combining many tricks together can create illusion of generality that is very convincing.

lonelappde 7y ago
The kludginess of brains is textbook neuroscience, from instincts to reflexes, to illusions and more. Indeed, Game AI puts the "Game" first -- as it should for Games, but to the detriment of anyone who cares more about AI and wants Games to be a fun place to study AI. If we split Game AI into "problem solving" (like pathfinding) and "opponent personality", then we can recover a lot of good AI that generalizes beyond games, without being misled by the parts that only useful for tricking people in a toy environment.
MereInterest 7y ago
> 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 cases. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- ben_w 7y ago
  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.
  - MiracleUser 7y ago
    Necessary to what end? It could be necessary to maximize survival for the species, but that doesnt make it necessary to maximize survival for an individual. It's perfectly possible our heuristics are muddied beyond necessity in order to generate variety in action, so as to reduce risk to the unknown for the species - even though it would cause a minority of individuals to consistently make sub-optimal choices. From a speculative standpoint, it's easy to find examples of people doing things that we consider 'stupid' but it pays off because of some unlikely event occurring in coincidence. Reality has a lot of unknowns. There is no perfect model that could account for that. It's possible being hyper-intelligent (beyond our current ability) is (or was) a disadvantage for the species
    - orestarod 7y ago
      Take depression and nihilism for example. Great intelligence can overcome the very drives that makes us want to keep living - which is an arbitrary cause, and an extremely tedious activity.
nwienert 7y ago
I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks at all. Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks” were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked. I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just don’t really know well yet.
- robotresearcher 7y ago
  > I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.
  - nwienert 7y ago
    Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things - it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked. Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.
    - grawprog 7y ago
      >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 each with their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.
echelon 7y ago
> Marvin Minsky Can we still cite Marvin Minsky in the AI field given the allegations that have arisen regarding his relationship with Epstein and sex trafficking? We should find better luminaries. I'm all for redemption and I hope Stallman comes around and apologizes, but Minsky went to the grave with whatever happened.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- echelon 7y ago
  Instead of downvoting me without a stated reason, can you provide a refutation? I'm open to changing my mind, but this is where it stands right now. I think we need to choose those we hold in esteem.
Reedx 7y ago
> evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers Yeah, that's the thing - the brain and body evolved for a much different environment than the one we find ourselves in today. So some aspects which used to be advantages are now disadvantages that we have to actively manage with things like exercise, healthy diet, meditation. Which the brain fights against.

The_mboga_real 7y ago

Great work! Have you considered looking into human gaming practices that border on the unethical and unfair?

thebrain 7y ago

Download it all with wget -r -A.pdf http://www.gameaipro.com/ http://www.gameaipro.com/ wget -r -A.zip http://www.gameaipro.com/ http://www.gameaipro.com/

fxtentacle 7y ago
That seems a bit rude to me, especially since they a) sell PDF ebooks and b) explicitly say that you are not supposed to re-upload the content elsewhere.
- oliwarner 7y ago
  Why? They've made this all available, why is grabbing it all in increase your own convenience (eg offline reading, searching) rude?
  - fxtentacle 7y ago
    Because when you actually read it, you will download 1 article per 30 minutes. If you batch-download all of their content now, you'll create much more peak load and, hence, costs for them.
    - faitswulff 7y ago
      On the other hand, if you download it all at once you aren't constantly reloading a page when you get back to it and you aren't limited to reading it when you're online. I do see the point you're making, though I think it depends on the author's perspective.
    - stevehawk 7y ago
      so he should seed a torrent instead of a wget command?
    - oliwarner 7y ago
      You can use --limit-rate=500k if you want to limit the bandwidth you're consuming. And load does not translate to cost for everybody. If you saturate the connection to my VPS, I don't pay more, it just gets slower for everybody in contention. I can spin up mirrors but if I'm offering a free resource like this, I'd be more likely to limit the bandwidth-per-client-IP or just actively let it run slow. They could even limit the bandwith to the subdirectory with... location /download/ { limit_conn addr 1; limit_rate 50k; }

fxtentacle 7y ago

What a generous gift :) And even though they gave a talk about in in 2015, their "Simplest AI Trick in the Book" is still not implemented by some games released nowadays. In case you don't know it, it's: 0.2s reaction time for aiming + 0.4s reaction time for yes/no decisions + additional delay for ambiguity, surprise, or limited visibility I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. Just seeing your opponent taking a moment to think makes whatever it is they do so much more convincing.

Jahak 7y ago

Thank you very much!

bdickason 7y ago

Very cool. I always expect a link like this to either be some super basic examples (e.g. how to implement flocking) or articles detailing techniques used in games from ~20 years ago. Very cool how recent and modern these are (along with super reputable authors)

spmealin 7y ago

What a cool and useful resource. Unfortunately, all of the pdf files are inaccessible to assistive technology (such as screen readers).

bmn__ 7y ago
What makes you think so? I tested book 3 chapter 1 with Okular and Festival plugin, works fine.

hesdeadjim 7y ago

Love these books. Two techniques I’ve found hugely valuable in practice are utility-based AI and flow field pathfinding/goal seeking.

Buttons840 7y ago

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 dominated by apologists explaining why it's not practical. Just one example of strong AI in a successful game would change the industry. After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of dumbing them down in fun ways.

dkersten 7y ago
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.
- baobabKoodaa 7y ago
  Have you played Civilization? The challenge of making a legitimate, human-beating AI, is near insurmountable.
Namrog84 7y ago
> After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of dumbing them down in fun ways An artificially handicapped or limited smart ai in video games is often obvious and not fun.
- Buttons840 7y ago
  I don't know about that, I much prefer playing chess video games against an artificially limited AI. Granted you did say "often", and I agree this is the exception. Starting with an AI that is weaker than human players, and then artificially limiting it even further does not produce a great AI. Although, some players still choose to play against these easiest of AIs. I believe starting with an AI that is far stronger than any human, and then artificially limiting it will be fun. This is a fundamentally different situation. This is like a chess engine, no human can hope to win without some artificial limitations on the AI. This is a type of AI we have never experience outside of a few abstract board games like chess. I look forward to seeing AIs like this come to 4X style games such as Civilization.

dmix 7y ago

> 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 reproducing these types of problems easier using deterministic playback methods (Dickinson 2001), where the entire state of the game simu-lation can jump back in time and resimulate the same problem over and over (Llopis 2008). Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from chapter 6]

anarazel 7y ago
> Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from chapter 6] rr comes pretty close. https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/

KenanSulayman 7y ago

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!

runevault 7y ago
They always do this when the next version of the book is close to coming out. The first 2 have been available for free for a while. It is expected with this that the 4th is coming soon.

SergeAx 7y ago

Shouldn't it have (2017) in title?

SloopJon 7y ago
"All chapters are available to download as of September 2019."
- SergeAx 7y ago
  As Hacker News is mostly informational resource, it is important when the information was produced, not when it became free of charge.

syspec 7y ago

The RVO chapter, and that concept I general is an amazing one because they really created a method for 2 autonomous characters avoiding collisions on a natural way - with code that is easy to understand

mottosso 7y ago

Does anyone know the reason why they suddenly became free?