<story><title>Game AI vs Traditional AI</title><url>http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/11/students-game-ai-vs-traditional-ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm999</author><text>I have an academic and professional background in traditional AI, and I&apos;ve programmed an AI for a 3D video game I made in college. My traditional AI background is mostly in applying a wide variety of mainstream machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, SVMs, and regression, to real world problems like fraud and image detection. I was somewhat frustrated when building the game AI because the best solution came down to building a large state machine with hard-coded logic. The AI was dead-simple, but it worked well and wasn&apos;t too far from state of the art in video game AIs at the time, and I suspect today.&lt;p&gt;I agree with the general point of this article; in fact, I think it understates the case. When people want AI in video games they want the AI to be truly smart. The fact is, we haven&apos;t cracked &quot;intelligence&quot; yet. Most of &apos;AI&apos; research has veered into machine learning, which is basically applied statistics. While this algorithms can solve many constrained problems quite well (this field powers much of google search) it&apos;s tough to frame complex problems like a 3D FPS AI, into a simple statistical framework. Even biologically-inspired AIs like neural networks are designed to solve highly constrained problems. In short, I don&apos;t think it&apos;s possible to even design a non-bruteforce AI, regardless of computational power, with what we currently know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KVFinn</author><text>One approach that has been more successful and easier to integrate than machine learning is Monte Carlo based systems.  That&apos;s what the latest Go AIs use and they are making big strides.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s powers various card game AIs, here&apos;s the developer talking about it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://hfog.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://hfog.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Though this absolutely brutal Race for the Galaxy AI was generated using machine learning: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.keldon.net/rftg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.keldon.net/rftg/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;He talks about it in this thread: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/438698/race-for-the-galaxy-ai/page/37&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/438698/race-for-the-gala...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[quote]Some of the AI neural nets for the Brink of War are only partially-trained; the AI performance in big games is way too slow and takes weeks to train. I&apos;ll need to fix that both so that players won&apos;t have to wait and to improve training speed.[/quote]&lt;p&gt;For &quot;true&quot; AI in games, check out Steve Grand&apos;s work:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://grandroids.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://grandroids.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XLJuDV03Mw&amp;#38;feature=youtu.be&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XLJuDV03Mw&amp;#38;feature=youtu...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Game AI vs Traditional AI</title><url>http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2011/07/11/students-game-ai-vs-traditional-ai/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rm999</author><text>I have an academic and professional background in traditional AI, and I&apos;ve programmed an AI for a 3D video game I made in college. My traditional AI background is mostly in applying a wide variety of mainstream machine learning algorithms, including neural networks, SVMs, and regression, to real world problems like fraud and image detection. I was somewhat frustrated when building the game AI because the best solution came down to building a large state machine with hard-coded logic. The AI was dead-simple, but it worked well and wasn&apos;t too far from state of the art in video game AIs at the time, and I suspect today.&lt;p&gt;I agree with the general point of this article; in fact, I think it understates the case. When people want AI in video games they want the AI to be truly smart. The fact is, we haven&apos;t cracked &quot;intelligence&quot; yet. Most of &apos;AI&apos; research has veered into machine learning, which is basically applied statistics. While this algorithms can solve many constrained problems quite well (this field powers much of google search) it&apos;s tough to frame complex problems like a 3D FPS AI, into a simple statistical framework. Even biologically-inspired AIs like neural networks are designed to solve highly constrained problems. In short, I don&apos;t think it&apos;s possible to even design a non-bruteforce AI, regardless of computational power, with what we currently know.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pmelendez</author><text>I hear you. I have a similar background like yours and I had a huge disappointment when I broke into the game industry 2 years ago. But I am not agree with you in the sense that an statistic approach is not possible. There are so many opportunities but the reality is that game designers don&apos;t want that to happen.&lt;p&gt;The main problem I have found in this regard is the fact that designers love to have control over the behaviour of the game, and I believe they don&apos;t even want to understand how a machine learning AI can be possible. I even discussed my master thesis (an SVM based controller for enemies) with a veteran RTS game designer and his response was very heart breaking, he just told me that Game AI was good enough and that &quot;people&quot; wouldn&apos;t care about a better AI (after that he just turned out and walked away)&lt;p&gt;I am still optimist that eventually that would happen. But I don&apos;t have enough patience to fight against that any more. So hopefully a young hacker reading this would change that :)</text></comment>