Quote: Original post by sion5
I was expecting a half arsed answer like that!

Theres clearly a divide between academics and "industry" programmers - that is to say any of you actually work or have ever worked in a games studio!

I have a Masters degree in Computing (specialising in AI), and work professionally in the game industry. The real divide is between people like me who appreciate that each side has different aims and needs, and people like you who think you know what is Right for everybody and what 'the other side' Should be doing.

Quote: Original post by sion5
I think this thread should just be shut down. Lets face it, not one person has answered a question I have asked constructively.

That's because you brought the wrong attitude to the thread, right up to the last question you asked and which my 'half-arsed' answer addressed.

Quote: no thanks to all you arrogant bastards who gave me such a hard time because I tried to learn more about a subject!

... that being one more example of this.

Quote:

Quote: Original post by sion5
I think this thread should just be shut down. Lets face it, not one person has answered a question I have asked constructively.

That's because you brought the wrong attitude to the thread, right up to the last question you asked and which my 'half-arsed' answer addressed.

Quote: no thanks to all you arrogant bastards who gave me such a hard time because I tried to learn more about a subject!

... that being one more example of this.

I disagree, as an external observer to the discussion this is what I witnessed:

He started out well with a positive attitude and an admirable goal for an academic project. He simply asked for some guidance.
Unfortunately you and others came to the thread, with an apparent vendetta against the mere concept of his project, and you unnecessarily and repeatedly tore him down. It was in fact, you folks who brought the negative attitude to this thread.
Unacceptable.

He handled it well at first, trying to make the best of the situation and carry on. But that wasn't enough, you had to really pile it on.

Yes, eventually he went over the edge ... but only because he was pushed.

[Edited by - brent_w on August 12, 2008 11:55:08 AM]

Care to say where I in particular did such a thing? Mainly I just took issue with his continued and repeated assertions that finding a use for neural networks is industry's problem. And his first response to me was "Thanks for that Kylotan, you raised some interesting points that I shall look into." So I suggest you cast your eye back over the thread before making generalised comments like that.

I have no desire to start a flame war, I'm just giving my impressions of the thread.

I saw him start out with a good attitude. Additionally I saw, from InnocuousFox's very first surprisingly condescending sentence, that attitude slowly worn away by unnecessarily negative responses from a number of individuals.

And I found your assertion, that it was in fact the original poster who was responsible for the negativity, so ironic I felt the need to address it.

I didn't say anything about negativity, just that he brought the 'wrong attitude', ie. that of industry's supposed responsibility towards research. Dropping that rather strange viewpoint would have helped matters a lot and avoided most of the 'ivory tower' style criticism.

Quote: Original post by brent_w
I saw him start out with a good attitude. Additionally I saw, from InnocuousFox's very first surprisingly condescending sentence, that attitude slowly worn away by unnecessarily negative responses from a number of individuals.

And I found your assertion, that it was in fact the original poster who was responsible for the negativity, so ironic I felt the need to address it.

Ya know... I'm catching a lot of heat for this thread which I find a bit disturbing. If you actually read the thread from page 1 to 4 rather than backwards, you see that I didn't take this south at all. My only mistake on the whole first page was my first line:

Quote: And thus we see why game degrees from institutions are received with a raised eyebrow from the AI programmers.

... Which is actually a link to a post that Damian Isla (and he is a reasonable authority on the subject you would think?) made about this very subject. It was not only relevant but timely since this thread came out shortly thereafter. Notice that it wasn't even MY freaking opinion? It was pointing out (even by an example) what the friction is with the industry responding to game degree grads not having the proper skills.

Other than that, nothing in that first post was negative aside from reiterating the 2nd posters warning about potential disturbances. I even answered his questions line by line.

Note that this was reacted to thusly:

Quote: To be honest I was expecting a reply like this.
[snip]
I find this comment a little rude.
[snip]
...can I remind people ...?
[snip]
I guess I may be expecting a little too much from a forum...

Note that the attitude is getting a little obnoxious?

My next reply was a simple (and innocuous) answer about how designers would view not having control.

In my next reply, my only real negative was when he got a little presumptuous by saying "but not 1 person has backed it up with fact or proof" to which I replied "You are the one doing the research paper, not the people replying here. Exhibit A is the past 30 years of the industry." I even pointed out that it was largely impossible to "prove" that NNs are not suitable for games. Was that rude or simply pointing out that people are likely unwilling to do his research for him?

The only other posts of mine on that page were replying to other people about the technical merits of NNs and why they don't work in games really well... which IS what the topic was, right?

And, on page 2, he stated:

Quote: So, the conclusion is that almost everyone in the industry hates NN's but academics love them :-) at least until they enter the industry.

Which is why I referred back to my initial line:

Quote: And now we have come full circle to my original comment regarding how the industry greets someone from academia - especially a student - with skepticism. Visit my link on that exact comment...

Admittedly, this is where I lost it... when he said:

Quote: Truth is academia is there to encourage innovation. I'm sorry but anyone can work in a factory pushing out the same product one after the other, but it takes academics to say "Hey wait, surely this can be done better?".
[snip]
If everyone's attitude is that we have found the best solution then there will never be an advancement in this domain.

To which I replied...

Quote: This is such a load of arrogant crap it is bordering on invalidating the usefulness of this entire thread and disqualifying you from further consideration on any relevant subject matter. 99% of the innovation in the modern world has come from outside academia. In the games industry, much the same can be said.
[snip]
Who is this "everyone" of which you speak? Every single time I sit down to work on my stuff, I'm trying to do something better. Every time I crack open the new AI Wisdom book, I see something from a front line dude that makes me say "damn... someone found a better way" - and usually it was because they were trying to solve a problem in their own projects. (You have read all the AI Wisdom books, right?)

The reason I did this is because, by this point, it was becoming obvious to me that he was completely prepared to piss on any statement that came from the non-academic industry. His whole attitude was oozing superiority and condescension on anything that came out of non-ivy-covered walls. And, it seemed, he was quite certain that he, himself, was part of the cutting edge elite while the rest of us industry schlubs could only gaze up at him on his pedestal. (Note: this is something that continued to trickle through the rest of this thread.)

Also, make note that this is the first time I lit off on this dude... after he had been slinging this arrogance around like a flail... at the END of page 2. By this time, I wasn't the only one who had tried to steer him in the right direction and actually provide answers to his questions. He just didn't want to hear them and was prepared to get whiny and belligerent about it.

So, going back through the above... what the hell did I do wrong? If I didn't then quit using me as the poster child for bad thread etiquette.

Quote: Original post by Kylotan
I didn't say anything about negativity, just that he brought the 'wrong attitude', ie. that of industry's supposed responsibility towards research. Dropping that rather strange viewpoint would have helped matters a lot and avoided most of the 'ivory tower' style criticism.

No kidding... as I said above, this was the point that I lost it.

What an odd approach of asking industry people for help and advice yet disparraging industry people as a whole. Make up your mind... do we non-academics know what we are talking about or not?

In my opinion, the general usefulness of neural networks will increase drastically relative to other AI implementations when available computing power doubles several more times.

Most other types of AI are very problem-specific and neural networks are more of a general approach to learning. If you had the resources to simulate as many nodes as there are neurons in a human brain all iterating at the same frequency our neurons fire at, then you'd be a lot closer to potentially simulating a high degree of general learning capacity. (this capacity being aimed at many different applications probably with excellent results)

Image processing, face recognition, strategic games like Go (specifically using it to evaluate the nodes of the monte carlo analysis), language learning, language teaching, etc. all come to mind.

But video games? I don't know. Maybe it would make for potentially very human-like opponents. Or human-like NPC's. Need some serious computing power for these things though.

Lol. Voted down 27 points for this post. I love Gamedev's rating system.

[Edited by - AlphaCoder on August 26, 2008 3:21:56 PM]

What happens when my NN opponent becomes too smart? What happens when they realize that I can only kill 4 opponents and that if all 12 of them rush me, there's no way they can loose?

The topic in general is interesting to me. But um, I'm not that intelligent. In many of my FPS games I perform the same actions. And once any learning AI registers that, I'm screwed!

Are there ways to prevent overachievement in NN AI?

-Xy

Any learning algorithm could potentially become too smart - this is not specific to artificial neural networks. eg. Something trivial like a PID controller with adjustable weights could potentially become too good at a racing game. And I seem to remember someone wrote a simple Bayesian predictor for an FPS which, given your current position, very accurately estimates where you're going to go next, meaning it can almost always be waiting for you in an optimal position. It's easy to do.

If you wanted AI that learns during the course of a game, you might try and stop it learning if it notices that it wins too often, or it might deliberately start adding more random noise to the output until the success rate drops. Or you might be able to twist things somewhat so that instead of always trying to maximise its success rate, it is trying to get as close to a 50% success rate as possible. (Or some other arbitrary value.)

Or you might decide that using such an unpredictable system is not conducive to releasing a fun game, and only do your training before release, which I expect is by far more common.