At least I think you are; are you?
Some of you may be familiar with the famous Turing test, which has a model for determining if the entity you are conversing with is artificial or not. The judge (you) engages in a natural language conversation, via computer screen and keyboard, with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine and if you can’t figure out which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.
Some interesting programs have been written over the years that approach this model and several times they have passed the test. My favorite was always ALICE (you can try it, and watch how Alice follows your cursor with her eyes).
The other I like is ELIZA. These bots use your question to answer you, and can be very interesting (you can talk to ELIZA here).
These programs are also called “chatterbots” and we used to play them on Pet computers, PDP8s, and even TR100s. Take a look at simonlaven.com.
The AI folks got together recently at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence annual meeting (say that five times fast, hell, just try saying it five times.) AI has many branches to its study, expert systems being one of the most prominent, and one of the few that actually generates money. Expert systems are used to build cars, sell you airplane tickets, and run various multi-mix production lines (don’t want Cheerios in your Pringle can do you?)
Microsoft of course is into this too and has a program, known as JamBayes, one of many aimed at turning computers into discreet assistants. And SRI International has a program that can schedule meetings, delegate tasks and book trips for a harried office worker, asking for guidance from the human when conflicts arise; pretty prosaic, what? But there was precious little on game AI, and I find that disappointing and disturbing.
So where then is the AI coming from in my favorite games? Well a lot of it is home grown, and quite frankly not really AI, but rather table look up stuff, repetitive and predicable – i.e., boring with a capital B. If you’re wandering down some dark hallway and a bad guy jumps out and kills you, you shouldn’t be able to anticipate him the next time you spawn. GRAW is pretty good at this, but still the “AI” in it can be predicted (and thank god or I’d still be on the first mission). There is a group, outside the AAAI that is addressing these issues, and you can also find some interesting discussion at AI-Depot.
But I want more (I always want more). I want the AI to be really unique and unpredictable, I want it to, uh, haunt me. I want to be surprised every time, not just the first time. I don’t want to be trained by the game on how to get through a mission or a hallway, I want it to be real, different each time – that’s immersive. There’s some good information on these concepts, with examples, and if you are interested in AI in games, and have a couple of hours to read about it, it's the page the read.
Now as you know, we’ve entered the era of the dual core CPUs, and by 2008 we’ll be in to the quad core CPU. It gets tricky after that due to power dissipation, but we could be looking at octal-core CPUs by the end of the decade.
But we don’t have to wait. One of the problems with AI in games has been CPU resources. AI can suck up as much of the game as anything. That’s easy to model. Just think of AI as being another game, a game within a game basically. It’s got to have a 3D engine, run collision avoidance, be environmentally aware as well as aware of you, run weapons, and be damaged by them, and with advanced physics, damaged by the environment. That’s lot to do and it takes a lot of CPU to do it.
The good news is some of the game developers are going to do this. Some of the new games, the ones the big publishers don’t produce but market, will have these new features. And, it’s one of the factors that adds to the development time and team size, but that’s a story for another time.
So in my fantasy, a great game will have real AI, it will have AI characters that chat with you, talk crap to you or maybe help you, and not just stupid wav files that get randomly run. These will be AI characters that will approach a passing grade for the turning test. And they’ll run in logical biologically correct patterns (the kind that NaturalMotion generates with their AI program.) They’ll be sensitive to the light, that is, they won’t be able to see into the dark, and they won’t be seen in the dark. And I’d like to see them make mistakes, to slip or trip while they are running. Also, has an AI combatant ever run out of ammo, or had a gun jam?
The AI characters don’t all have to be enemies either. I like the old guy on the beach in Lost Coast. I’d like to be able to ask towns people for directions, or question them about someone.
This will happen. We will be pushing the limits of the Turning test, and we’ll have several processors in our PCs, and our consoles, dedicated to running these programs.
So, as much as I love pixels, if we want a truly immersive experience we’ve got to get better AI. I’m going to go talk to Alice about this now; I’ll let you know what she thinks.
