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Is anyone interested in doing this kind of analysis for games that are in development? I am a SWE with 16 years of experience at Google with lots of practical/

Is anyone interested in doing this kind of analysis for games that are in development? I am a SWE with 16 years of experience at Google with lots of practical/applied ML. I am about to be funemployed, and I'd love to incorporate an AI player/analysis into the playtest feedback loop of a board/card game in development. I've won the Race for the Galaxy tournament 4 times in 7 attempts at the World Boardgaming Championship (average size of field around 80?) and placed in the Dominion tournament a few times. I created rftgstats and councilroom.com (Dominion), which did analysis/modelling on game logs, but didn't have AI players.

melonmouse 5y ago
Another funemployed xoogler here! I've been making games for the last year, and one thing I would definitely love to explore is designing a deep but easy to learn game using learning techniques. We should talk! You can reach me on: melonmousegames@gmail.com
sorenn111 5y ago
Start-up/Consulting idea: use ML/RL strategies and tools and help gaming companies improve their AI. In a variety of games, the AI should be a big component of gameplay (all single player games) and ends up being such a liability. I can imagine the litany of issues that prevent this, but I wonder if a company could accumulate some general templates/models/toolkits that could help AI improve for a variety of gaming companies. Most AI in games are more like Stockfish than AlphaZero and the cost to train these models for each of these games is probably prohibitively high. However, I imagine a variety of gaming companies that provide a 1st person game would not mind outsourcing their NPC AI and perhaps a company could find some synergy across games such that the marginal cost of going from game to game could be decreased. An example game that fits your board game template more or less are turn based games like Civilization. I love Civ games but the AI stupidity is the weakest part of the game. I know RTS games like starcraft are super hard (probably why Deepmind chose to do it) but perhaps turn based games or games with a slower pace and limited action space are doable for a consulting company. Idk, food for thought, but if you make a billion dollar company I'm saving this post for my records :P
- gundmc 5y ago
  An AlphaZero type AI for Civ is my absolute dream. A huge problem in these sorts of games is that developers have the computer players cheat to artificially raise the difficulty to compensate for the poor skill and decision making of the AI.

melonmouse 5y ago

Another funemployed xoogler here! I've been making games for the last year, and one thing I would definitely love to explore is designing a deep but easy to learn game using learning techniques. We should talk! You can reach me on: melonmousegames@gmail.com

sorenn111 5y ago

Start-up/Consulting idea: use ML/RL strategies and tools and help gaming companies improve their AI. In a variety of games, the AI should be a big component of gameplay (all single player games) and ends up being such a liability. I can imagine the litany of issues that prevent this, but I wonder if a company could accumulate some general templates/models/toolkits that could help AI improve for a variety of gaming companies. Most AI in games are more like Stockfish than AlphaZero and the cost to train these models for each of these games is probably prohibitively high. However, I imagine a variety of gaming companies that provide a 1st person game would not mind outsourcing their NPC AI and perhaps a company could find some synergy across games such that the marginal cost of going from game to game could be decreased. An example game that fits your board game template more or less are turn based games like Civilization. I love Civ games but the AI stupidity is the weakest part of the game. I know RTS games like starcraft are super hard (probably why Deepmind chose to do it) but perhaps turn based games or games with a slower pace and limited action space are doable for a consulting company. Idk, food for thought, but if you make a billion dollar company I'm saving this post for my records :P

gundmc 5y ago
An AlphaZero type AI for Civ is my absolute dream. A huge problem in these sorts of games is that developers have the computer players cheat to artificially raise the difficulty to compensate for the poor skill and decision making of the AI.