Comments on: Computer Learns to Take Over Virtual Worlds by Doing What Most of Us Don’t: Reading the Manual

By: Andy Farid

Andy Farid — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 05:50:35 +0000

foundthe majority ofwillhave the same opinionwith your blog.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:03:42 +0000

And here we thought SkyNet would be the end of us.

By: Kevin R. Bridges

Kevin R. Bridges — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:30:29 +0000

I think it’s interesting that a randomly acting program won 46 percent of the time.

By: Wesley

Wesley — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:39:43 +0000

What I don’t understand is how almost random play can get the computer a 46% winning advantage? Are the humans playing randomly too?

By: hopeful

hopeful — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:02:22 +0000

It would be outstanding for AI of this level to be built into civilisation however, I for one don’t look forward to the 2tb download to get the AI opponent!

That said, without knowing anything about the game at all, a win ratio of 46% is damn impressive. Or worrying, if you’re a dedicated Civ player!

By: FlaGator

FlaGator — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:10:49 +0000

I wonder what difficulty level the computer was playing against. I still find it near impossible to beat the CivIV AI at Noble level.

By: Naveed

Naveed — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 01:08:50 +0000

Very awesome. Can’t wait until this gets into real video games will make games much more fun and challenging.

amphiox, it sounds like the AI they used played the player since the article mentions them teaching it about mouse movements and what shows up on the screen (the real AI doesn’t see any of this). Also in Civ 2 and for many many games they only write one AI and they give the player or AI bonuses and handicaps depending on the difficulty level. Hopefully they used a normal or higher difficulty to show the superiority of this new AI.

The AI right now is one of the areas in gaming where there really needs to be some improvement. The AI can never stack up to a player on an even playing field and usually has some quirks/flaws that can be exploited.

By: Awnshegh

Awnshegh — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:57:20 +0000

I played Civ 2 to death. The original manual was a behemoth with some serious instructions on how the game should be played in order to win. It’s no surprise that reading them would provide better results in games – the surprise is having a seperate AI (from the game code) that can put 2 and 2 together and actually use this information.

Will it change gaming AI? Maybe. Remember gaming AI is built on very simple yet lengthy branching scripts for decision making and pathing. This is a paradigm shift with results that aen’t necessarily in line with what the programmers may want. Where’s the tweakability if they wan the AI to be easy, medium or hard?

So what will it change? Personally I think this will become a gaming QA dream. You could build an external AI to run the game through hundreds or thousands of iterations of games to hunt out bugs, AI quirks (within the game) and even find balancing issues which currently take weeks or months of testing.

By: amphiox

amphiox — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:01:22 +0000

Who or what was the computer playing against? A human player, or the games own opponent AI? (In the second instance, wouldn’t that count as the computer playing against itself?) And if the AI, what level?

A 79% victory rate against the programmed opponent AI would suggest that this self-learning algorithm could be incorporated into the game to make a more challenging AI opponent for the human player. (And could the AI be programmed over time to learn in contests against the human player to become ever more adept at playing that human player?)