Advances in Artificial Intelligence for next generation, & advanced AIs in videogames

Cyan

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Online games are more and more common nowadays, and even so a well-programmed AI can be very valuable in many situations or story-driven games, to the point that some of those AIs are really admirable.

Artificial intelligence can make the difference in those games to become more rewarding and even masterpieces when played at higher difficulty levels, especially when they have a choice of actions and are able to behave in a very unpredictable fashion.

Whether it is a companion's AI -i.e. Skyrim or Bioshock Infinite- or an opposing AI, an advanced behaviour, adding to this an unique situational awareness, certainly helps a lot to increase immersion, adding a nice component of believability.

This certainly can make games more dynamic or realistic. Humans are unique and so it is human intelligence, and trying to make your console or computer act in a similar way to human intelligence sounds very challenging.

If an AI can pull off enough unpredictabiliy to simulate human choices that's certainly an achievement, especially when logic is applied to those choices, and it can interact logically with its surroundings.

I never play MMOs because of the always online thing, but an MMO with AIs when you are offline could be very interesting, for instance.

Here are some examples of great AIs:


Bioshock Infinite, an article about the behaviour of the AI.


"An Effin' AI In BioShock Infinite Is More Of A Human Than I Am"


The Barbarian AI in Age of Empires 2 HD. It certainly plays an amazing game and can perform actions human can't do.


To me one of its most incredible achievements is that it can lure boars just like humans, which is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in an AI.




AI that teaches itself to play NES games, it can get very good at some of them. It can pull off some tricky and some fascinating moves:




Autonomous agent AI playing a clone of Super Mario Bros with great results, beating a level and again making things human can't do.




More about autonomous agent AIs and Multi-seed agent AIs -more advanced versions of mono seed autonomous agent AIs (shown in the video)-


http://geneura.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/863/


Fan made Reaper Bot from Quake 1. It learnt from the players moving around the map and was great at pathfinding.


It was programmed by Steven Polge back in the 90s, and Epic hired him afterwards.




Halo has always had a great AI.




I would like to add an apparently fine AI who can turn rogue and fail in some conditions.


Skyrim "Radiant AI" can sometimes work great, but it's kind of cheap and have very fun reactions at times.


My favourite:




Skyrim, beware the door lol:




More Skyrim:




Some more:




Skyrim trick cabbage shot and how the Skyrim react after throwing a simple cabbage, sigh:




Finally and additionally, I just wanted to point out that the AI in some chess games is simply amazing.

I wonder if we will see an improvement in AIs this next generation which is about to begin.
 
I thought we have an AI thread somewhere... Can't find it.
I couldn't find anything either and when I wrote the title of the thread the suggestions that the forum displayed automatically didn't show there is a similar thread in this very forum. It could well be but it's something I am not aware of.

cheers
 
patsu, i think the discussion about AI were in the middle of another thread/topic. The discussion also already very wide. touching online/cloud AI, taking data from real gamer, project milo thing, etc.

but where is that topic :/
 
Yes this is the latest one. I believe we started 1-2 more AI threads in the past too. I couldn't find any of them. The forum search doesn't seem to work well with keywords shorter than 3 letters ? :p
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but from my limited understanding of its implementation in games, I believe that most if not all shooting games just use a Finite State Machine for their enemy AI behaviour rather than Behaviour Tree or anything else. There's only so much you can do with FSM to give an "illusion" of complexity.
 
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Behavior trees are pretty broadly used. But IMO there isn't a huge difference between a behavior tree and a hierarchical concurrent FSM.

The usual requirements are that behavior can be constrained and that when something doesn't behave as expected there is some way to diagnose and fix it.

FWIW I've also seen shooters that use mechanisms similar to the Sims AI which attempts to pick an action based on optimizing some metric for a given current state, it amounts to a 1 layer neural net, the issue is that when you see a behavior out of place it's incredibly hard to diagnose exactly why it happened and tweaking almost anything affects everything else making tuning the behavior an art form.
 
Ey guys,i think you are talking about this thread
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=63264
I will mention here again the fantastic AI of the Half Life 1 soldiers...
If there was a way mods could integrate this thread and the responses here in that thread...I think it would be a great idea.

@deathkiller, it's the first news item I have ever heard on the matter.

@nightshade and @ERP, :) thanks for your enlightenment. Does it mean that every AI should be considered some kind of FSM?
 
After playing Forza 5 for a couple of weeks now I can safely say that it has the most competitive and unpredictable, human like AI.

The cars now negotiate the turns in different ways and races aren't a procession anymore.

I mean, no one car is behind the other just following a line, the Drivatars have very different personalities.

These short videos exemplify that. Some are truly A-mazing.

WOW this first one, just wow. :oops: -like a boss- I lol'ed I must admit.








 
Good AIs are fascinating and can make things human will never able to do, it isn't physically possible.

This video shows one of the best Age of Empires AIs in action. I am surprised at how they "learnt" to hunt the boar at the beginning of the game and things like that.

Rushing, trushing, flushing, they can make that happen too.

 
I've read that Skyrim's NPCs were simplified compared to what they did with Oblivion. Lots of them don't have AI packages setup so they don't have goals. It's less likely for mayhem and unexpected frustrations to occur.

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/1408830-skyrims-radiant-ai-downgraded/
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50978/?
I played Oblivion intensively back in the day and I remember people having more tasks than in Skyrim, some more mundane than others, and some of them including things as simple as eating.

This is one of my favourite youtube videos ever since I watched it time ago, roleplaying at its best.

Here the guy disagrees with the politics of Chorrol :D (the guy is totally hilarious, but that's the kind of personality I usually like) and carefully plans an assassination (he previously had gotten rid of the queen's parents to make her suffer) which involves apple poisoning the AI (I think you can't poison food in Skyrim), at dinner time in the castle.

You can see the result in the video:

 
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The AI solutions that excite me are not the approaches to traditional problem solving such as Pathfinding and Response based behaviour but the more non-symbolic approaches to problem space behaviours and adaptation. Especially evolutionary approaches to agent response and the inclusion of real world rules into the creation of maps etc. I can't wait until a terrain is no longer designed but created from procedural rules that follow the real formation of geography. Something the cloud would seem to offer. Populate that with critters that have intelligences adapted to these surrounds and then apply the standard forms of AI solutions to flesh out their agency. That I would like to see.
 
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