Hello everyone. I am a new member of the community that just signed up. While I was browsing the neural network AI topics, I found lots of questions on how to implement neural networks in game AI. I am very interested in this topic as well and was wondering if there is a community that exists for discussing approaches and applications to using neural networks in game AI. If so can someone kindly direct me to it? If not can we make one?

Neural networks are a tool that has had limited application in game AI. I don't think it's worth having a separate venue to talk about them. Try posting here and see how it goes.

And there are plenty of forums for that sort of discussion in non-game-related areas (i.e. not on this site).

Neural networks and reinforcement learning take a large pool of data sets. They are also impossible for a game designer to fine-tune. State machines (and nested state machines) are the typical route for games.

Some games have used reinforcement learning techniques, although generally not to the point of an ANN. Black and White used it to help train your beast avatar, you could reward or punish the creature and it would push it to repeat or avoid the actions in the future. Some board games like Go and Chess simulators have used ANN's, it works well against casual players but not the masters of the games.

Some features of games, like voice recognition or text recognition or video capture recognition or VR gesture recognition, these sometimes are trained on a large data set to recognize the elements, but those don't happen during the game and the training results generally don't directly affect the game. Instead the results are used as input -- often validated by confirmation -- and consumed by the simple state machines that run the game.

Some board games like Go and Chess simulators have used ANN's, it works well against casual players but not the masters of the games.

This is not true for go. All of the strong go programs out there use ANNs, and the best one (AlphaGo) seems to be stronger than any human.

comp.ai.neural-networks on USENET. you can access it through google groups. It's probably nothing but spam by now though, I think the group started dying since eternal september.

Some board games like Go and Chess simulators have used ANN's, it works well against casual players but not the masters of the games.

This is not true for go. All of the strong go programs out there use ANNs, and the best one (AlphaGo) seems to be stronger than any human.

Indeed, Alphago uses a mix of classic AI techniques (Monte Carlo search tree) and ANNs. It could easily have been done with chess too, and it worked in quite a lot of Atari games.

No Limit Hold Em Poker heads up too has been beaten by an ANN based AI.

The problem is that many games seem much more complex than go, or don't require a killer AI.

The games that suffer the most from poor AI would be wargames, and complex strategy games like Civilization, Starcraft and XCOM, but the game state would be so complex that using ANNs for them might be quite difficult (but their "classical" AI is usually not very good either).

It might work but it would be mostly uncharted territory.

[...] It could easily have been done with chess too, [...]

Actually, I am not so sure. There have been several attempts at using neural networks for chess, and the results are generally poor. I've tried myself without much success. My last attempt was this past weekend, when I tried to train a very simple ANN to learn the value of material imbalances (including subtleties like the strength of the pair of bishops, the loss of value of the bishop with the presence of lots of your own pawns, etc.). I couldn't get it to work better than a few hand-crafted rules, and that seems to always be the story with chess.

No Limit Hold Em Poker heads up too has been beaten by an ANN based AI.

Kind of.

The problem is that many games seem much more complex than go, or don't require a killer AI.

This.

People need to remember that we aren't trying to "solve" something here... we are trying to create an experience. Often, that experience needs to include intentionally sub-optimal decisions and intentionally distinct characters. If you are trying to "solve" behavior, you get neither.

[...] It could easily have been done with chess too, [...]

Actually, I am not so sure. There have been several attempts at using neural networks for chess, and the results are generally poor. I've tried myself without much success. My last attempt was this past weekend, when I tried to train a very simple ANN to learn the value of material imbalances (including subtleties like the strength of the pair of bishops, the loss of value of the bishop with the presence of lots of your own pawns, etc.). I couldn't get it to work better than a few hand-crafted rules, and that seems to always be the story with chess.

I thought Giraffe had achieved reasonable success with a NN based approach.

Alphago performed much worse when it relied solely on ML. Combining regular search and ML worked best acording to the deepmind go team. So maybe combining both would also work better for chess. That said, it is also quite possible that raw computation outperforms ML for chess because it lends itself to brute force better.