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Apparently procedural generation and constraint solvers are AI now? I thought they were just algorithms. (I love Townscaper, btw, but this article—whew.)
by tedyoung 4y ago
Apparently procedural generation and constraint solvers are AI now? I thought they were just algorithms. (I love Townscaper, btw, but this article—whew.)
- wodenokoto 4y agoIt’s _all_ just algorithms.
- iancmceachern 4y agoBut if you call it AI you get more investment
- detaro 4y agoGame development has long used the term for anything that pretends to have intelligent behavior. It's not quite the same as other parts of tech use it.
- cookie_monsta 4y agoMy Netflix recommendation engine appears to be about as intelligent as those wolfenstein guards from back in the day
- baq 4y agoback when maze solving algorithms were unknown, BFS was AI. AI is magic, algorithms are what AI turns into when problems are actually figured out.
- duxup 4y agoIn the context of gaming I used to call it: “the computer” Later I called it: “AI” Such as “Is the AI still brain dead in Civilization VI?” In a gaming context I think of it as entirely different from a more computer science definition of AI.
- SamBam 4y agoAI is literally just algorithms. Yes, these days it's most commonly used to describe something that we can't quite understand the inner-workings of (huge neutral networks; big data), but A* pathfinding and decision trees are also AI.
- alexcnwy 4y agoIt’s called AI until it works, then it’s called an algorithm.
- skybrian 4y agoWhen I took an artificial intelligence class in college a long time ago, it covered things like path finding and breadth first search.
- CuriousCosmic 4y agoAI is a lot of things. It's essentially just the category of algorithms, control theory, and machine learning. If you are just referring to AI as in ML, even then ML is at its core a series of processes for tuning control systems. Those ML models are just complex versions of traditional systems from control theory with the tuning handled by the training process. So yes in a sense, procedural generation, constraint solvers, wave collapse, etc can all be seen as AI since they are just different ways of solving the problem of "how do I believably make/do X in a useful or believable way".
- sebastialonso 4y agoConstraints solvers was literally half of my AI university course lol
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoThat might be reading too much into it. IIRC, hasn't gaming been referring to any kind of computer opponents as "AI" since at least the '80s? I'd almost call the games industry usage of AI as its own independent (albeit related) jargon at this point; games "AI" may use ML, NN, and other AI techniques but isn't required to.
- mikepurvis 4y agoI always found it weird when SNES-era console games would refer to the built-in opponent as the "computer". Like, it kind of makes sense, but it wasn't aligned to my understanding of what a computer was. In any case, since around the release of Unreal Tournament in the late nineties, I've always just referred to them as bots— that feels for me like it strikes the right balance in terms of expressing that it's a non-human participant in the game, and one whose behaviours may be varying degrees of intelligent, as far as leveraging pre-scripted actions and potentially cheats.
- ethbr0 4y agoAlso, it didn't hurt that UT bots were pretty impressive for the era (1999?) tech. I.e. generally behaving pretty similar to players, minus the environment-exploitation
- WillPostForFood 4y ago"Bot" is an interesting adaptive use of Robot. Robot traditionally describing something mechanical with gears and made of steel. Something pretty different that the computer controlled characters in Unreal.
- p1necone 4y agoIn video games, smoke and mirrors is an acceptable solution to any problem :)