Truly intelligent enemies could change the face of gaming

https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/26/the-future-of-video-game-violence/

by pmcpinto • 9 years ago

28 68 9 years ago

terminado• 9 years ago

...or more to the point, intelligent enemies unbound by human reaction time, common grade school intellect, and the requisite hand-eye-coordination of rival human opponents in multiplayer games.

zkms• 9 years ago

unbound by human reaction time
requisite hand-eye-coordination of rival human opponents

it's totally possible to force an AI enemy to "play" through a harness that simulates human reaction time, limits in human visual processing (a human can't perfectly focus on all the screen at once -- check out eye-tracking data taken on people who are playing an FPS!), and the latency/error that happens when a human uses a mouse to aim in a game.

The whole point of AI enemies isn't to expose them to all the game's state and let them input commands with zero latency -- that's not an AI opponent, that's just a cheat engine. It's only fun if the AI has no more information from the game than a human player would have and can control the game with no better control authority than a human can.

FooHentai• 9 years ago

Yup, this is key to keeping things fun. Like the term 'harness' as well, that illustrates it well.

CM304• 9 years ago

Yeah, this.

We've already got opponents unbound by human reaction and with abilities far better than normal humans. They're basically a mainstay of the fighting game genre:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PerfectPlayAI

And they're not that fun to fight, because they're too 'good'.

msoad• 9 years ago

If you play FIFA you'll know how dumb computer is. Sure it's faster but it doesn't do any "novel" tricks and it becomes super predictable after you play against it enough times.

I'm looking forward to deep learning based FIFA opponents

jacobwilliamroy2• 9 years ago

There is a team at Carnegie Mellon who build little toaster-sized automatons that play soccer. Their end goal is for the AI to eventually be good enough to win the world cup.

Their site: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer/small/#Overview

codeulike10• 9 years ago

If you believe in the philosophical position known as Strong AI, then at some point in the perhaps quite distant future, when the AI gets good enough, the use of advanced AIs in computer games will become a civil rights issue. That is, we might need to have limits on how accurately NPCs can be simulated. Because at some point the simulations will be indistinguishable from reality including by the simulations themselves.

problems12• 9 years ago

Bits are bits, regardless of how "advanced" they are, they're still bits. "Killing" them (if you can call it that) is fine. If your life depends on someone else's hardware, their rights trump yours.

Of course, no sane developer would ever use something at that level for a game, it'd just be emulating way too much useless stuff. Clever game bots are much simpler than that - simply picking a less than "optimal" path sometimes and giving them the ability to cheat in some ways makes things a lot more interesting.

codeulike10• 9 years ago

OK, lets assume that its possible to simulate a human mind well enough that the difference is indistinguishable (this is a very familiar idea in a lot of sci-fi, uploading consciousness and all that sort of thing). If you accept that assumption, things very quickly get complicated. Would it be OK to kill a virtual copy of a person? If so, on what basis? That people running in biological brains are somehow more real than digital ones? Why? How do you know you're not running in a simulation right now, etc etc.

nilved• 9 years ago

Atoms are atoms, regardless of how "advanced" they are, they're still atoms. "Killing" people (if you can call it that) is fine.

FullMtlAlcoholc3• 9 years ago

Bits are bits, regardless of how "advanced

By the same token quarks are quarks. I think a better way to approach this is to azk the question "Does it suffer"

Pets are considered property and ultimately their lives are based upon not your Hardware but your resources, your ability to provide them with food, shelter, etc. Although we provide for them, we have laws against animal torture, cruelty, etc.

CM304• 9 years ago

Fiction is fiction. Characters in games and other virtual universes are not real, and things like real life rights and criminal laws should not applied to them.

Otherwise, it's a bit like trying to regulate what people are allowed to dream of.

codeulike10• 9 years ago

Put it this way: if we ever do create AIs that can (for want of a better yardstick) pass the Turing Test reliably, someone somewhere will stick them in a computer game for people to shoot at them. Sit and think about the philosophical implications of that for a minute.

Mtinie• 9 years ago

The best AI competitors, today, still would get taken apart by the best human players.

How many generations before that changes?

CM304• 9 years ago

Not just enemies either. Strong AI with standard NPCs could make for some interesting game experiences too. Like say, virtual villagers or townspeople who have their own lives seperate from the player and their actions and react in realistic ways in regards to events going on around them.

We can already see elements of that in games now (Zelda Breath of the Wild puts a lot of thought into giving NPCs realistic behaviours for damn near any possible interaction), but it could get a lot better in the future.

As for enemies, there are definitely ways intelligent enemy AI could change games there. However, you have to be careful about one thing when implementing these systems and randomness and what not.

Games generally have to be enjoyable to the player, and making your enemies too realistic can hinder that. They draw on this a bit in the article:

If you're playing a game and the AI's always completely unpredictable, it just turns into a frustrating experience for the player because they can't learn a good strategy to actually succeed at the game

But it goes further than that. A smart enemy with a good battle strategy might be overly defensive, and that itself might not be all too fun for the person fighting against them. Look at the Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword for example. The motion controlled combat was a big part of the game's setup, but the enemies countering and being careful to block your attacks and what not may have actually made the fighting less exciting for the player. They came across as rather unaggressive as a result.

It's sometimes more exciting to have your basic enemies act like Leeroy Jenkins esque cannon fodder.

Either way, it's an interesting area to think about.

tonmoy• 9 years ago

I'm looking forward to the day games like Civilization will have such a good AI that they wouldn't need to buff the AI with multipliers to make the game challenging

smhost• 9 years ago

Games generally have to be enjoyable to the player, and making your enemies too realistic can hinder that.

If you're talking about inducing gambling addiction in the player, it shouldn't matter whether the enemies are too realistic or not. It has to do with rewarding the player in such a way that the player's brain believes that there is a pattern to the rewards when there really isn't. You should be able to do that with realistic AI.

keithnz• 9 years ago

future of violence is in MultiPlayer games, something about virtually killing real people that's quite popular. from the tame'ish Dota2, to war games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, through to open survival games like Rust which really demonstrate how brutal people can be :)

joosters3• 9 years ago

For me, the interesting problem, as mentioned in the article, is that developers still need to make the AI opponents suck. We want FPS games where the enemies 'feel' real, but we can't make them too clever. Most shooter games put you in control of a lone fighter battling against countless foes. If the enemies were clever, then you'd have absolutely no chance of surviving!

You could improve the AI so that your opponents do smarter things (flanking you, working as a team, etc) and less dumb things (repeatedly popping up out of cover, for instance), but then the game would be immensely harder. To balance that out, you'd have to handicap the enemies in other ways, like make them even worse at aiming, or giving them weaker weapons, but that might make the game less fun.

Perhaps improved AI may lead to different gaming styles? Fewer 'you vs an entire army' scenarios, instead more nuanced challenges with lower numbers of bad guys...

barrkel• 9 years ago

Generally the only way I enjoy playing FPS games is using a stealth approach, or failing that, a plan involving mines, distractions, sniping, etc. If an enemy spots me and starts attacking, it's a bit of a failure. If I get hit, it's a total failure. Think base takeovers in the more recent Far Cry series games. All time favourite was the Thief series; Dishonoured didn't quite do it for me.

Games that require or force a Rambo situation with enemies on all sides are just ridiculous. I like to observe, plan and execute, in that order. Randomness can't be controlled; you're just lucky, or your enemy has been hobbled and it's not a fair fight, otherwise.

joosters3• 9 years ago

Me too - thief was a fantastic game and stealth is an entertaining way to play. But even here, the AI is dumb and deliberately so. If the guards in Far Cry were more realistic, they'd spot you far more easily, or would notice things like half their buddies have gone missing, perhaps they should investigate?

nine_k• 9 years ago

Deus Ex (released 18 years ago) was great in this regard. You could try to fight an army (well, a regiment) in open combat and have a chance to survive. You could build a tank out of yourself for that. Or you could stealth your way through without killing anyone, or even being seen by anyone, being physically feeble but fast and good at hacking things. The game did not force you to use any particular approach; it just put you into a situation to tackle.

Regarding shooting. the game had the best difficulty level menu I've ever seen:

    * Easy
    * Medium
    * Hard
    * Realistic

stale20022• 9 years ago

Well, it depends on the game genre.

For example, In real time strategy games, AI is unbelievablely horrible.

AI is so horrible, that even though it could play starcraft with a million actions per second, it STILL sucks.

I agree that an AI auto headshotting you in an FPS wouldn't be fun.

But we arent even close on the RTS front to get anything passable.

joosters3• 9 years ago

It's not really a 'AI headshot' problem - computer opponents can have 100% shooting accuracy right now, and everyone can see that it would make games no fun. It's more that improved AI would make the enemies cleverer. In a realistic world, you stand no chance of taking on an army single handed. You could try to even out the balance by making the enemies even worse shots, but that might also be no fun. An army of ineffectual storm troopers who can't hit anything wouldn't be much of a threat :)

plorkyeran• 9 years ago

Brood War AIs aren't beating pros yet, but they are putting up a credible fight and can reliably beat decent human players. The one built in to the game are a joke, but that's a result of zero time being spent on it and not because the problem is intractable.

jacobwilliamroy2• 9 years ago

F.E.A.R. is a great case study in this respect, because the enemy AI is absurdly simple. Enemies only have 3 states, plus a plan.

The neat trick was that instead of embedding the logic for changing state and setting parameters into the states themselves, they built a planning system which declares goals for the AI, and then allows the AI to procedurally generate the sequence of states it needs go through in order to be at that goal.

To this day F.E.A.R.'s enemy AI is praised for being extremely deadly and realistic.

Here's Jeff Orkin's GDC paper about it: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/%7Ejorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fea...

Truly intelligent enemies could change the face of gaming

Related Stories