AI SHOULD be doing what its programmed to do, if not, fire the programmers.


Where it is going? Hopefully adaptive. Learning from tactics used against it, easiest to look at in an RTS. Say you are playing a RTS, and you hit the computer player from all sides and win. next game, it Might protect itself against that, or it might use it against you. I'm sure some games already do that, but what will hopefully come, if it isn't already, is the computer taking apart attack patterns, and then rebuilding its own from pieces of yours.

Things like that, 'creating' its own patterns in one way or another, or not using patterns or something that isn't "Build X number of Y, and attack from Z"

This is one of those kind of questions...

To sum up the Turing test, it doesn't matter how the computer works as long as it can fool a human to believe it is another human and not a machine.

There have been a few rare instances in games I play frequently where the AI algorithm just went 'berzerk'. At times I honestly believed perhaps, the game developer had snuck a backdoor and someone at the company was actually playing me.
It was not behaving like the typical algorithm.

Whether it was thinking like a human? I don't know. It just was not acting in it's predicatble ways. Was it programmed to do that? I guess, but why it happens I can't replicate. It does not happen frequently but spontaneously.

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Original post by Metahawk [...]Do you feel that AI in games is actually thinking like a human or just doing what it is programmed to do? What is the future of AI in video games in your opinion?

AI in games is just randomly selecting choices using heuristics that rarely point towards optimal solutions. I guess you could call that 'thinking like a human', in that many humans make stupid choices quite often. Game AI is just much better at it than even the least intelligent humans.

I see no future in video game AI. Over the years, I've seen little to no improvement in commercial game AI, while I see tons of innovative ideas and implementations by researchers and indie developers. I believe the lack of advancement in commercial games is due to the fact that nearly all resources are used to make the game look better or have better physics etc and either there aren't any game AI specialists on the project or there are no resources left for them to use for AI after the frame is finished rendering and being otherwise calculated.

I think AI will be as important as ever improving graphics were in the past. I think there will be a convergence of interactive storytelling and games. NPCs will become more like humans and will act on thier own accord and games will be more dynamic and open. I want to see more dialogue between NPCs and the player, things like chat bots could easily be implemented in a game and i think we will see this along side speech recognition with the next generation games consoles.

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Do you feel that AI in games is actually thinking like a human or just doing what it is programmed to do?

In my opinion, the goal of game AI is to make the bots behave humanlike so the player has as much fun playing against the computer than when playing multiplayer. Well that ever be possible? Hard to say. But the cool thing about video game programming is that you can just fake it. It doesn't really have to mimic a human, it just has to seem that way to the player.

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What is the future of AI in video games in your opinion?

The future of AI in games is looking very good. Developers are starting to really try new techniques instead of the traditional finite state machines. An exciting area in particular is adaptive behavior: bots evolving with the player, emergent behavior. This is all very exciting stuff and very much achievable. I think new AI might even spawn new genres.