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How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code

109 points by arem 18y ago

chops 18y ago
Very clever, and it's probably true that "intelligent mistakes" are the keys to believable and (more importantly) to enjoyable gamer experience, especially in the domain of games where everything is known and completely predictable (such as in his example with billiards). Fascinating stuff indeed.
malkia 18y ago
Great article from Mick! This also reminds how the folks from New World Computing (Heroes Of Might of Magic) were forced to dumb down the AI, so it's more interresting, challenging...
shellerik 18y ago
Interesting ideas. I wonder if the perfect AI would study its opponent's moves and learn to move just as they would, then it would be like the human is playing against themselves.
- bad_user 18y ago
  It would be really hard ... because it involves studying your intentions rather than your moves. In chess this is doable (the intent is clearer after the fact, and the possible moves are more limited), but think about CStrike for example ... how is your algorithm going to realize that you're protecting a gate because you don't want your opponents to sneak behind your teammates? Even simple questions become hard ... say you're attacking X1 just as a distraction, while your teammates are attacking X2 ... a team uses slight variations of some tactic, it's mostly never the same (different men in charge, different hotspots, switching between X1 and X2, etc ...). Gathering useful statistics about it requires lots of played games and lots of resources, and I don't think it's doable on your average gamer's hardware. I know, stupid example :) but you get the point.
  - iron_ball 18y ago
    This is the reason it's difficult to come up with fun AI for head-to-head fighting games: once you get past the thin veneer of mastering the moves, they're entirely about mindgames. A FSM-based CPU opponent does not have a thought process a human player can predict and exploit, nor the ability to avoid repeated mistakes. I believe this applies to many other types of games as well, but games with many split-second paper-scissors-rock decisions suffer the most. A computer can be programmed to scout out and react to a carrier buildup in Starcraft, but cannot easily be programmed to outguess a jab/throw mixup in Street Fighter.
    - eru 18y ago
      Don't game theories mixed strategies solve this problem? After all nobody can beat random selectian at paper-scissors-rock.
      - jibiki 18y ago
        My vague recollection is that RPS is the subject of AI competitions. You can't "beat" random selection, but you can't lose to it either. So if you want to win a tournament, you have to try to guess what your opponents will do, assuming that they too want to win, and are guessing your actions.
        eru 18y ago
        Yes. But most programs fall back on pure randomness in those contests when they have a losing streak.
dfranke 18y ago
Artificial stupidity? Isn't there already enough of the real McCoy?
- patio11 18y ago
  It is worthwhile taking this joke as serious, because the perspective on why we need AI at all is enlightening. Take WoW, for example. Right now there are several million players logged in, busy beating the tar out of several million bad guys who are programmed to lose. They are playing, and paying good money, to have the illusion of challenge while winning the overwhelming majority of all encounters. (Why can't PVP replace this for most players? Because PVP implies someone is losing and the overwhelming majority of players want to decisively win the overwhelming majority of encounters. There is no way to accomplish those things without instructing a non-player to throw their matches.) Let's say we replaced the AI with hired actors who played the monsters, and played poorly. Heck, we'll say the actors can even multitask 4 monsters at a time, all played to a similar level of poorly. At 60 monster-hours (15 man hours) per month per player, Blizzard would be in the red on accounts just from the actors salary unless their fully-loaded cost was under $1 a man-hour. Even if they got away with 40 cent wages for urban China and had minimal overhead this would slash their margins to bits. So that's why we have AI: to do jobs humans won't do willingly (losing) at a price which is cheaper than the cheapest possible human implementation.
  - murrayh 18y ago
    We need calculators because it's cheaper than keeping a human with you at all times to calculate sums for you. That sounds pretty silly, right?
    - patio11 18y ago
      To correct your analogy: imagine a world in which humans needed to be constantly told their math skills were awesome (I don't know, maybe as confidence building for middle-school girls). In this world, we might have calculators which were designed to provide the wrong answer, so that people would type in 36 x 50, get -7 as the answer, and say "Hah, I'm much better at this than you are." In this world, which parallels the MMORPG use case, yes, its cheaper to keep a calculator to be the whipping boy than to keep around a human who has been instructed to perform math poorly.
critic 18y ago
Incorporating intelligence is the hard part.
- endtime 18y ago
  Unless you're using 'intelligence' to mean something other than what the article means by it, incorporating intelligence is not the hard part.
Zaak 18y ago
Your off-world investments in artificial dumbness have paid $150 in dividends.

109 points by arem 18y ago

chops 18y ago

Very clever, and it's probably true that "intelligent mistakes" are the keys to believable and (more importantly) to enjoyable gamer experience, especially in the domain of games where everything is known and completely predictable (such as in his example with billiards). Fascinating stuff indeed.

malkia 18y ago

Great article from Mick! This also reminds how the folks from New World Computing (Heroes Of Might of Magic) were forced to dumb down the AI, so it's more interresting, challenging...

shellerik 18y ago

Interesting ideas. I wonder if the perfect AI would study its opponent's moves and learn to move just as they would, then it would be like the human is playing against themselves.

bad_user 18y ago
It would be really hard ... because it involves studying your intentions rather than your moves. In chess this is doable (the intent is clearer after the fact, and the possible moves are more limited), but think about CStrike for example ... how is your algorithm going to realize that you're protecting a gate because you don't want your opponents to sneak behind your teammates? Even simple questions become hard ... say you're attacking X1 just as a distraction, while your teammates are attacking X2 ... a team uses slight variations of some tactic, it's mostly never the same (different men in charge, different hotspots, switching between X1 and X2, etc ...). Gathering useful statistics about it requires lots of played games and lots of resources, and I don't think it's doable on your average gamer's hardware. I know, stupid example :) but you get the point.
- iron_ball 18y ago
  This is the reason it's difficult to come up with fun AI for head-to-head fighting games: once you get past the thin veneer of mastering the moves, they're entirely about mindgames. A FSM-based CPU opponent does not have a thought process a human player can predict and exploit, nor the ability to avoid repeated mistakes. I believe this applies to many other types of games as well, but games with many split-second paper-scissors-rock decisions suffer the most. A computer can be programmed to scout out and react to a carrier buildup in Starcraft, but cannot easily be programmed to outguess a jab/throw mixup in Street Fighter.
  - eru 18y ago
    Don't game theories mixed strategies solve this problem? After all nobody can beat random selectian at paper-scissors-rock.
    - jibiki 18y ago
      My vague recollection is that RPS is the subject of AI competitions. You can't "beat" random selection, but you can't lose to it either. So if you want to win a tournament, you have to try to guess what your opponents will do, assuming that they too want to win, and are guessing your actions.
      - eru 18y ago
        Yes. But most programs fall back on pure randomness in those contests when they have a losing streak.

dfranke 18y ago

Artificial stupidity? Isn't there already enough of the real McCoy?

patio11 18y ago
It is worthwhile taking this joke as serious, because the perspective on why we need AI at all is enlightening. Take WoW, for example. Right now there are several million players logged in, busy beating the tar out of several million bad guys who are programmed to lose. They are playing, and paying good money, to have the illusion of challenge while winning the overwhelming majority of all encounters. (Why can't PVP replace this for most players? Because PVP implies someone is losing and the overwhelming majority of players want to decisively win the overwhelming majority of encounters. There is no way to accomplish those things without instructing a non-player to throw their matches.) Let's say we replaced the AI with hired actors who played the monsters, and played poorly. Heck, we'll say the actors can even multitask 4 monsters at a time, all played to a similar level of poorly. At 60 monster-hours (15 man hours) per month per player, Blizzard would be in the red on accounts just from the actors salary unless their fully-loaded cost was under $1 a man-hour. Even if they got away with 40 cent wages for urban China and had minimal overhead this would slash their margins to bits. So that's why we have AI: to do jobs humans won't do willingly (losing) at a price which is cheaper than the cheapest possible human implementation.
- murrayh 18y ago
  We need calculators because it's cheaper than keeping a human with you at all times to calculate sums for you. That sounds pretty silly, right?
  - patio11 18y ago
    To correct your analogy: imagine a world in which humans needed to be constantly told their math skills were awesome (I don't know, maybe as confidence building for middle-school girls). In this world, we might have calculators which were designed to provide the wrong answer, so that people would type in 36 x 50, get -7 as the answer, and say "Hah, I'm much better at this than you are." In this world, which parallels the MMORPG use case, yes, its cheaper to keep a calculator to be the whipping boy than to keep around a human who has been instructed to perform math poorly.

critic 18y ago

Incorporating intelligence is the hard part.

endtime 18y ago
Unless you're using 'intelligence' to mean something other than what the article means by it, incorporating intelligence is not the hard part.

Zaak 18y ago

Your off-world investments in artificial dumbness have paid $150 in dividends.