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Artificial intelligence in video games

In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to generate responsive, adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non-player characters (NPCs) similar to human-like intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of video games since their inception in the 1950s.[1] AI in video games is a distinct subfield and differs from academic AI. It serves to improve the game-player experience rather than machine learning or decision making. During the golden age of arcade video games the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized in the form of graduated difficulty levels, distinct movement patterns, and in-game events dependent on the player's input. Modern games often implement existing techniques such as pathfinding and decision trees to guide the actions of NPCs. AI is often used in mechanisms which are not immediately visible to the user, such as data mining and procedural-content generation.[2]

In general, game AI does not, as might be thought and sometimes is depicted to be the case, mean a realization of an artificial person corresponding to an NPC in the manner of the Turing test or an artificial general intelligence.

Overview

The term "game AI" is used to refer to a broad set of algorithms that also include techniques from control theory, robotics, computer graphics and computer science in general, and so video game AI may often not constitute "true AI" in that such techniques do not necessarily facilitate computer learning or other standard criteria, only constituting "automated computation" or a predetermined and limited set of responses to a predetermined and limited set of inputs.[3][4][5]

Many industries and corporate voices[6][failed verification] claim that so-called video game AI has come a long way in the sense that it has revolutionized the way humans interact with all forms of technology, although many[who?] expert researchers are skeptical of such claims, and particularly of the notion that such technologies fit the definition of "intelligence" standardly used in the cognitive sciences.[3][4][5] Industry voices[7][failed verification] make the argument that AI has become more versatile in the way we use all technological devices for more than their intended purpose because the AI allows the technology to operate in multiple ways, allegedly developing their own personalities and carrying out complex instructions of the user.[8]

However, people[9][failed verification] in the field of AI have argued that video game AI is not true intelligence, but an advertising buzzword used to describe computer programs that use simple sorting and matching algorithms to create the illusion of intelligent behavior while bestowing software with a misleading aura of scientific or technological complexity and advancement.[3][4][5] Since game AI for NPCs is centered on appearance of intelligence and good gameplay within environment restrictions, its approach is very different from that of traditional AI.

History

Game playing was an area of research in AI from its inception. One of the first examples of AI is the computerized game of Nim made in 1951 and published in 1952. Despite being advanced technology in the year it was made, 20 years before Pong, the game took the form of a relatively small box and was able to regularly win games even against highly skilled players of the game.[1] In 1951, using the Ferranti Mark 1 machine of the University of Manchester, Christopher Strachey wrote a checkers program and Dietrich Prinz wrote one for chess.[10] These were among the first computer programs ever written. Arthur Samuel's checkers program, developed in the middle 50s and early 60s, eventually achieved sufficient skill to challenge a respectable amateur.[11] Work on checkers and chess would culminate in the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBM's Deep Blue computer in 1997.[12] The first video games developed in the 1960s and early 1970s, like Spacewar!, Pong, and Gotcha (1973), were games implemented on discrete logic and strictly based on the competition of two players, without AI.

Games that featured a single player mode with enemies started appearing in the 1970s. The first notable ones for the arcade appeared in 1974: the Taito game Speed Race (racing video game) and the Atari games Qwak (duck hunting light gun shooter) and Pursuit (fighter aircraft dogfighting simulator). Two text-based computer games from 1972, Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek, also had enemies. Enemy movement was based on stored patterns. The incorporation of microprocessors would allow more computation and random elements overlaid into movement patterns.

 
Light cycle characters compete to be the last one riding, in GLtron.

It was during the golden age of video arcade games that the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized, due to the success of Space Invaders (1978), which sported an increasing difficulty level, distinct movement patterns, and in-game events dependent on hash functions based on the player's input. Galaxian (1979) added more complex and varied enemy movements, including maneuvers by individual enemies who break out of formation. Pac-Man (1980) introduced AI patterns to maze games, with the added quirk of different personalities for each enemy. Karate Champ (1984) later introduced AI patterns to fighting games. First Queen (1988) was a tactical action RPG which featured characters that can be controlled by the computer's AI in following the leader.[13][14] The role-playing video game Dragon Quest IV (1990) introduced a "Tactics" system, where the user can adjust the AI routines of non-player characters during battle, a concept later introduced to the action role-playing game genre by Secret of Mana (1993).

Games like Madden Football, Earl Weaver Baseball and Tony La Russa Baseball all based their AI in an attempt to duplicate on the computer the coaching or managerial style of the selected celebrity. Madden, Weaver and La Russa all did extensive work with these game development teams to maximize the accuracy of the games.[citation needed] Later sports titles allowed users to "tune" variables in the AI to produce a player-defined managerial or coaching strategy.

The emergence of new game genres in the 1990s prompted the use of formal AI tools like finite state machines. Real-time strategy games taxed the AI with many objects, incomplete information, pathfinding problems, real-time decisions and economic planning, among other things.[15] The first games of the genre had notorious problems. Herzog Zwei (1989), for example, had almost broken pathfinding and very basic three-state state machines for unit control, and Dune II (1992) attacked the players' base in a beeline and used numerous cheats.[16] Later games in the genre exhibited more sophisticated AI.

Later games have used bottom-up AI methods, such as the emergent behaviour and evaluation of player actions in games like Creatures or Black & White. Façade (interactive story) was released in 2005 and used interactive multiple way dialogs and AI as the main aspect of game.

 
A robot goes for the ball and competes in Robocup.

Games have provided an environment for developing artificial intelligence with potential applications beyond gameplay. Examples include Watson, a Jeopardy!-playing computer; and the RoboCup tournament, where robots are trained to compete in soccer.[17]

Views

Many experts complain that the "AI" in the term "game AI" overstates its worth, as game AI is not about intelligence, and shares few of the objectives of the academic field of AI. Whereas "real AI" addresses fields of machine learning, decision making based on arbitrary data input, and even the ultimate goal of strong AI that can reason, "game AI" often consists of a half-dozen rules of thumb, or heuristics, that are just enough to give a good gameplay experience.[citation needed] Historically, academic game-AI projects have been relatively separate from commercial products because the academic approaches tended to be simple and non-scalable. Commercial game AI has developed its own set of tools, which have been sufficient to give good performance in many cases.[2]

Game developers' increasing awareness of academic AI and a growing interest in computer games by the academic community is causing the definition of what counts as AI in a game to become less idiosyncratic. Nevertheless, significant differences between different application domains of AI mean that game AI can still be viewed as a distinct subfield of AI. In particular, the ability to legitimately solve some AI problems in games by cheating creates an important distinction. For example, inferring the position of an unseen object from past observations can be a difficult problem when AI is applied to robotics, but in a computer game a NPC can simply look up the position in the game's scene graph. Such cheating can lead to unrealistic behavior and so is not always desirable. But its possibility serves to distinguish game AI and leads to new problems to solve, such as when and how to cheat.[citation needed]

The major limitation to strong AI is the inherent depth of thinking and the extreme complexity of the decision-making process. This means that although it would be then theoretically possible to make "smart" AI the problem would take considerable processing power.[citation needed]

Usage

In computer simulations of board games

In modern video games

Game AI/heuristic algorithms are used in a wide variety of quite disparate fields inside a game. The most obvious is in the control of any NPCs in the game, although "scripting" (decision tree) is currently the most common means of control.[18] These handwritten decision trees often result in "artificial stupidity" such as repetitive behavior, loss of immersion, or abnormal behavior in situations the developers did not plan for.[19]

Pathfinding, another common use for AI, is widely seen in real-time strategy games. Pathfinding is the method for determining how to get a NPC from one point on a map to another, taking into consideration the terrain, obstacles and possibly "fog of war".[20][21] Commercial videogames often use fast and simple "grid-based pathfinding", wherein the terrain is mapped onto a rigid grid of uniform squares and a pathfinding algorithm such as A* or IDA* is applied to the grid.[22][23][24] Instead of just a rigid grid, some games use irregular polygons and assemble a navigation mesh out of the areas of the map that NPCs can walk to.[22][25] As a third method, it is sometimes convenient for developers to manually select "waypoints" that NPCs should use to navigate; the cost is that such waypoints can create unnatural-looking movement. In addition, waypoints tend to perform worse than navigation meshes in complex environments.[26][27] Beyond static pathfinding, navigation is a sub-field of Game AI focusing on giving NPCs the capability to navigate in a dynamic environment, finding a path to a target while avoiding collisions with other entities (other NPC, players...) or collaborating with them (group navigation).[citation needed] Navigation in dynamic strategy games with large numbers of units, such as Age of Empires (1997) or Civilization V (2010), often performs poorly; units often get in the way of other units.[27]

Rather than improve the Game AI to properly solve a difficult problem in the virtual environment, it is often more cost-effective to just modify the scenario to be more tractable. If pathfinding gets bogged down over a specific obstacle, a developer may just end up moving or deleting the obstacle.[28] In Half-Life (1998), the pathfinding algorithm sometimes failed to find a reasonable way for all the NPCs to evade a thrown grenade; rather than allow the NPCs to attempt to bumble out of the way and risk appearing stupid, the developers instead scripted the NPCs to crouch down and cover in place in that situation.[29]

Video game combat AI

Many contemporary video games fall under the category of action, first-person shooter, or adventure. In most of these types of games, there is some level of combat that takes place. The AI's ability to be efficient in combat is important in these genres. A common goal today is to make the AI more human or at least appear so.

One of the more positive and efficient features found in modern-day video game AI is the ability to hunt. AI originally reacted in a very black and white manner. If the player were in a specific area then the AI would react in either a complete offensive manner or be entirely defensive. In recent years, the idea of "hunting" has been introduced; in this 'hunting' state the AI will look for realistic markers, such as sounds made by the character or footprints they may have left behind.[30] These developments ultimately allow for a more complex form of play. With this feature, the player can actually consider how to approach or avoid an enemy. This is a feature that is particularly prevalent in the stealth genre.

Another development in recent game AI has been the development of "survival instinct". In-game computers can recognize different objects in an environment and determine whether it is beneficial or detrimental to its survival. Like a user, the AI can look for cover in a firefight before taking actions that would leave it otherwise vulnerable, such as reloading a weapon or throwing a grenade. There can be set markers that tell it when to react in a certain way. For example, if the AI is given a command to check its health throughout a game then further commands can be set so that it reacts a specific way at a certain percentage of health. If the health is below a certain threshold then the AI can be set to run away from the player and avoid it until another function is triggered. Another example could be if the AI notices it is out of bullets, it will find a cover object and hide behind it until it has reloaded. Actions like these make the AI seem more human. However, there is still a need for improvement in this area.

Another side-effect of combat AI occurs when two AI-controlled characters encounter each other; first popularized in the id Software game Doom, so-called 'monster infighting' can break out in certain situations. Specifically, AI agents that are programmed to respond to hostile attacks will sometimes attack each other if their cohort's attacks land too close to them.[citation needed] In the case of Doom, published gameplay manuals even suggest taking advantage of monster infighting in order to survive certain levels and difficulty settings.

Monte Carlo tree search method

Game AI often amounts to pathfinding and finite state machines. Pathfinding gets the AI from point A to point B, usually in the most direct way possible. State machines permit transitioning between different behaviors. The Monte Carlo tree search method[31] provides a more engaging game experience by creating additional obstacles for the player to overcome. The MCTS consists of a tree diagram in which the AI essentially plays tic-tac-toe. Depending on the outcome, it selects a pathway yielding the next obstacle for the player. In complex video games, these trees may have more branches, provided that the player can come up with several strategies to surpass the obstacle. In this 2022 year's survey,[32] you can learn about recent applications of the MCTS algorithm in various game domains such as perfect-information combinatorial games, strategy games (including RTS), card games etc.

Uses in games beyond NPCs

Academic AI may play a role within Game AI, outside the traditional concern of controlling NPC behavior. Georgios N. Yannakakis highlighted four potential application areas:[2]

  1. Player-experience modeling: Discerning the ability and emotional state of the player, so as to tailor the game appropriately. This can include dynamic game difficulty balancing, which consists in adjusting the difficulty in a video game in real-time based on the player's ability. Game AI may also help deduce player intent (such as gesture recognition).
  2. Procedural-content generation: Creating elements of the game environment like environmental conditions, levels, and even music in an automated way. AI methods can generate new content or interactive stories.
  3. Data mining on user behavior: This allows game designers to explore how people use the game, what parts they play most, and what causes them to stop playing, allowing developers to tune gameplay or improve monetization.
  4. Alternate approaches to NPCs: These include changing the game set-up to enhance NPC believability and exploring social rather than individual NPC behavior.

Rather than procedural generation, some researchers have used generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create new content. In 2018 researchers at Cornwall University trained a GAN on a thousand human-created levels for DOOM (1993); following training, the neural net prototype was able to design new playable levels on its own. Similarly, researchers at the University of California prototyped a GAN to generate levels for Super Mario.[33] In 2020 Nvidia displayed a GAN-created clone of Pac-Man; the GAN learned how to recreate the game by watching 50,000 (mostly bot-generated) playthroughs.[34]

Cheating AI

Gamers always ask if the AI cheats (presumably so they can complain if they lose)

— Terry Lee Coleman of Computer Gaming World, 1994[35]

In the context of artificial intelligence in video games, cheating refers to the programmer giving agents actions and access to information that would be unavailable to the player in the same situation.[36] Believing that the Atari 8-bit could not compete against a human player, Chris Crawford did not fix a bug in Eastern Front (1941) that benefited the computer-controlled Russian side.[37] Computer Gaming World in 1994 reported that "It is a well-known fact that many AIs 'cheat' (or, at least, 'fudge') in order to be able to keep up with human players".[38]

For example, if the agents want to know if the player is nearby they can either be given complex, human-like sensors (seeing, hearing, etc.), or they can cheat by simply asking the game engine for the player's position. Common variations include giving AIs higher speeds in racing games to catch up to the player or spawning them in advantageous positions in first-person shooters. The use of cheating in AI shows the limitations of the "intelligence" achievable artificially; generally speaking, in games where strategic creativity is important, humans could easily beat the AI after a minimum of trial and error if it were not for this advantage. Cheating is often implemented for performance reasons where in many cases it may be considered acceptable as long as the effect is not obvious to the player. While cheating refers only to privileges given specifically to the AI—it does not include the inhuman swiftness and precision natural to a computer—a player might call the computer's inherent advantages "cheating" if they result in the agent acting unlike a human player.[36] Sid Meier stated that he omitted multiplayer alliances in Civilization because he found that the computer was almost as good as humans in using them, which caused players to think that the computer was cheating.[39] Developers say that most game AIs are honest but they dislike players erroneously complaining about "cheating" AI. In addition, humans use tactics against computers that they would not against other people.[37]

Examples

In the 1996 game Creatures, the user "hatches" small furry animals and teaches them how to behave. These "Norns" can talk, feed themselves, and protect themselves against vicious creatures. It was the first popular application of machine learning in an interactive simulation. Neural networks are used by the creatures to learn what to do. The game is regarded as a breakthrough in artificial life research, which aims to model the behavior of creatures interacting with their environment.[40]

In the 2001 first-person shooter Halo: Combat Evolved the player assumes the role of the Master Chief, battling various aliens on foot or in vehicles. Enemies use cover very wisely, and employ suppressing fire and grenades. The squad situation affects the individuals, so certain enemies flee when their leader dies. Attention is paid to the little details, with enemies notably throwing back grenades or team-members responding to being bothered. The underlying "behavior tree" technology has become very popular in the games industry since Halo 2.[40]

The 2005 psychological horror first-person shooter F.E.A.R. has player characters engage a battalion of cloned super-soldiers, robots and paranormal creatures. The AI uses a planner to generate context-sensitive behaviors, the first time in a mainstream game. This technology is still used as a reference for many studios. The Replicas are capable of utilizing the game environment to their advantage, such as overturning tables and shelves to create cover, opening doors, crashing through windows, or even noticing (and alerting the rest of their comrades to) the player's flashlight. In addition, the AI is also capable of performing flanking maneuvers, using suppressing fire, throwing grenades to flush the player out of cover, and even playing dead. Most of these actions, in particular the flanking, is the result of emergent behavior.[41][42]

The survival horror series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007–) confronts the player with man-made experiments, military soldiers, and mercenaries known as Stalkers. The various encountered enemies (if the difficulty level is set to its highest) use combat tactics and behaviors such as healing wounded allies, giving orders, out-flanking the player and using weapons with pinpoint accuracy.[citation needed]

The 2010 real-time strategy game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty gives the player control of one of three factions in a 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 battle arena. The player must defeat their opponents by destroying all their units and bases. This is accomplished by creating units that are effective at countering opponents' units. Players can play against multiple different levels of AI difficulty ranging from very easy to Cheater 3 (insane). The AI is able to cheat at the difficulty Cheater 1 (vision), where it can see units and bases when a player in the same situation could not. Cheater 2 gives the AI extra resources, while Cheater 3 gives an extensive advantage over its opponent.[43]

See also

Lists

References

  1. ^ a b Grant, Eugene F.; Lardner, Rex (2 August 1952). "The Talk of the Town – It". The New Yorker.
  2. ^ a b c Yannakakis, Geogios N (2012). "Game AI revisited" (PDF). Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Computing Frontiers: 285–292. doi:10.1145/2212908.2212954. ISBN 9781450312158. S2CID 4335529. (PDF) from the original on 8 August 2014.
  3. ^ a b c Bogost, Ian (March 2017). ""Artificial Intelligence" Has Become Meaningless". Retrieved 22 July 2017.
  4. ^ a b c Kaplan, Jerry (March 2017). "AI's PR Problem". MIT Technology Review.
  5. ^ a b c Eaton, Eric; Dietterich, Tom; Gini, Maria (December 2015). "Who Speaks for AI?". AI Matters. 2 (2): 4–14. doi:10.1145/2847557.2847559. S2CID 207233310.
  6. ^ "How artificial intelligence will revolutionize the way video games are developed and played". 6 March 2019.
  7. ^ "Why gaming AI won't help make AI work in the real world—but could". 30 August 2018.
  8. ^ Eastwood, Gary. . CIO. Archived from the original on 28 February 2017. Retrieved 28 February 2017.
  9. ^ "Why video games and board games aren't a good measure of AI intelligence". 19 December 2019.
  10. ^ See "A Brief History of Computing" at AlanTuring.net.
  11. ^ , Schaeffer, Jonathan. One Jump Ahead:: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers, 1997,2009, Springer, ISBN 978-0-387-76575-4. Chapter 6.
  12. ^ McCorduck, Pamela (2004), Machines Who Think (2nd ed.), Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, Ltd., ISBN 1-56881-205-1, pp. 480–483
  13. ^ First Queen at MobyGames
  14. ^ "Official Site". Kure Software Koubou. Retrieved 19 May 2011. (Translation)
  15. ^ Schwab, 2004, pp. 97–112
  16. ^ Schwab, 2004, p. 107
  17. ^ Emergent Intelligence in Games 19 February 2011 at the Wayback Machine17 February 2011.
  18. ^ Good, Owen S. (5 August 2017). "Skyrim mod makes NPC interactions less scripted, more Sims-like". Polygon. Retrieved 16 April 2018.
  19. ^ Lara-Cabrera, R., Nogueira-Collazo, M., Cotta, C., & Fernández-Leiva, A. J. (2015). Game artificial intelligence: challenges for the scientific community.
  20. ^ Yannakakis, G. N. (2012, May). Game AI revisited. In Proceedings of the 9th conference on Computing Frontiers (pp. 285–292). ACM.
  21. ^ Hagelback, Johan, and Stefan J. Johansson. "Dealing with fog of war in a real-time strategy game environment." In Computational Intelligence and Games, 2008. CIG'08. IEEE Symposium On, pp. 55-62. IEEE, 2008.
  22. ^ a b Abd Algfoor, Zeyad; Sunar, Mohd Shahrizal; Kolivand, Hoshang (2015). "A Comprehensive Study on Pathfinding Techniques for Robotics and Video Games". International Journal of Computer Games Technology. 2015: 1–11. doi:10.1155/2015/736138.
  23. ^ Yap, Peter. "Grid-based path-finding." In Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, pp. 44-55. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2002.
  24. ^ Sturtevant, N. R. (June 2012). "Benchmarks for Grid-Based Pathfinding". IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games. 4 (2): 144–148. doi:10.1109/TCIAIG.2012.2197681. S2CID 2864753.
  25. ^ Goodwin, S. D., Menon, S., & Price, R. G. (2006). Pathfinding in open terrain. In Proceedings of International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology.
  26. ^ Nareyek, A. (2004). AI in computer games. Queue, 1(10).
  27. ^ a b Cui, X., & Shi, H. (2011). A*-based pathfinding in modern computer games. International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, 11(1), 125-130.
  28. ^ "Design Techniques and Ideals for Video Games". Byte Magazine. Vol. 7, no. 12. 1982. p. 100.
  29. ^ Lidén, L. (2003). Artificial stupidity: The art of intentional mistakes. AI game programming wisdom, 2, 41-48.
  30. ^ Schreiner, Tim. "Artificial Intelligence in Game Design." Artificial Intelligence Depot. Web. 19 November 2009. AI-depot.com 10 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  31. ^ Statt, Nick (9 March 2019). "HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY VIDEO GAMES ARE DEVELOPED AND PLAYED". Retrieved 23 February 2020.
  32. ^ Świechowski, Maciej; Godlewski, Konrad; Sawicki, Bartosz; Mańdziuk, Jacek (2022). "Monte Carlo Tree Search: a review of recent modifications and applications". Artificial Intelligence Review. doi:10.1007/s10462-022-10228-y. S2CID 232147848.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  33. ^ "AI creates new levels for Doom". BBC News. 8 May 2018. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
  34. ^ Vincent, James (22 May 2020). "Nvidia's AI recreates Pac-Man from scratch just by watching it being played". The Verge. Retrieved 28 May 2020.
  35. ^ Coleman, Terry Lee (July 1994). "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Sovereign". Computer Gaming World. pp. 110–111.
  36. ^ a b Scott, Bob (2002). "The Illusion of Intelligence". In Rabin, Steve (ed.). AI Game Programming Wisdom. Charles River Media. pp. 16–20.
  37. ^ a b Wilson, Johnny L.; Brown, Ken; Lombardi, Chris; Weksler, Mike; Coleman, Terry (July 1994). "The Designer's Dilemma: The Eighth Computer Game Developers Conference". Computer Gaming World. pp. 26–31.
  38. ^ Wilson, Johnny L. (February 1994). "Mea Culpas And Culpability". Editorial. Computer Gaming World. p. 8.
  39. ^ "The 7th International Computer Game Developers Conference". Computer Gaming World. July 1993. p. 34. Retrieved 12 July 2014.
  40. ^ a b AiGameDev – Top 10 Most Influential AI Games
  41. ^ Horti, Samuel (3 April 2017). "Why F.E.A.R.'s AI is still the best in first-person shooters". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  42. ^ "Building the AI of F.E.A.R. with Goal Oriented Action Planning". gamasutra.com. 7 May 2020. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  43. ^ "StarCraft II". StarCraft II. Retrieved 28 February 2017.

Bibliography

External links

  • on aiwisdom.com
  • Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius

artificial, intelligence, video, games, video, games, artificial, intelligence, used, generate, responsive, adaptive, intelligent, behaviors, primarily, player, characters, npcs, similar, human, like, intelligence, artificial, intelligence, been, integral, par. In video games artificial intelligence AI is used to generate responsive adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non player characters NPCs similar to human like intelligence Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of video games since their inception in the 1950s 1 AI in video games is a distinct subfield and differs from academic AI It serves to improve the game player experience rather than machine learning or decision making During the golden age of arcade video games the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized in the form of graduated difficulty levels distinct movement patterns and in game events dependent on the player s input Modern games often implement existing techniques such as pathfinding and decision trees to guide the actions of NPCs AI is often used in mechanisms which are not immediately visible to the user such as data mining and procedural content generation 2 In general game AI does not as might be thought and sometimes is depicted to be the case mean a realization of an artificial person corresponding to an NPC in the manner of the Turing test or an artificial general intelligence Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Views 4 Usage 4 1 In computer simulations of board games 4 2 In modern video games 4 2 1 Video game combat AI 4 3 Monte Carlo tree search method 4 4 Uses in games beyond NPCs 5 Cheating AI 6 Examples 7 See also 8 References 9 Bibliography 10 External linksOverview EditThe term game AI is used to refer to a broad set of algorithms that also include techniques from control theory robotics computer graphics and computer science in general and so video game AI may often not constitute true AI in that such techniques do not necessarily facilitate computer learning or other standard criteria only constituting automated computation or a predetermined and limited set of responses to a predetermined and limited set of inputs 3 4 5 Many industries and corporate voices 6 failed verification claim that so called video game AI has come a long way in the sense that it has revolutionized the way humans interact with all forms of technology although many who expert researchers are skeptical of such claims and particularly of the notion that such technologies fit the definition of intelligence standardly used in the cognitive sciences 3 4 5 Industry voices 7 failed verification make the argument that AI has become more versatile in the way we use all technological devices for more than their intended purpose because the AI allows the technology to operate in multiple ways allegedly developing their own personalities and carrying out complex instructions of the user 8 However people 9 failed verification in the field of AI have argued that video game AI is not true intelligence but an advertising buzzword used to describe computer programs that use simple sorting and matching algorithms to create the illusion of intelligent behavior while bestowing software with a misleading aura of scientific or technological complexity and advancement 3 4 5 Since game AI for NPCs is centered on appearance of intelligence and good gameplay within environment restrictions its approach is very different from that of traditional AI History EditGame playing was an area of research in AI from its inception One of the first examples of AI is the computerized game of Nim made in 1951 and published in 1952 Despite being advanced technology in the year it was made 20 years before Pong the game took the form of a relatively small box and was able to regularly win games even against highly skilled players of the game 1 In 1951 using the Ferranti Mark 1 machine of the University of Manchester Christopher Strachey wrote a checkers program and Dietrich Prinz wrote one for chess 10 These were among the first computer programs ever written Arthur Samuel s checkers program developed in the middle 50s and early 60s eventually achieved sufficient skill to challenge a respectable amateur 11 Work on checkers and chess would culminate in the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBM s Deep Blue computer in 1997 12 The first video games developed in the 1960s and early 1970s like Spacewar Pong and Gotcha 1973 were games implemented on discrete logic and strictly based on the competition of two players without AI Games that featured a single player mode with enemies started appearing in the 1970s The first notable ones for the arcade appeared in 1974 the Taito game Speed Race racing video game and the Atari games Qwak duck hunting light gun shooter and Pursuit fighter aircraft dogfighting simulator Two text based computer games from 1972 Hunt the Wumpus and Star Trek also had enemies Enemy movement was based on stored patterns The incorporation of microprocessors would allow more computation and random elements overlaid into movement patterns Light cycle characters compete to be the last one riding in GLtron It was during the golden age of video arcade games that the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized due to the success of Space Invaders 1978 which sported an increasing difficulty level distinct movement patterns and in game events dependent on hash functions based on the player s input Galaxian 1979 added more complex and varied enemy movements including maneuvers by individual enemies who break out of formation Pac Man 1980 introduced AI patterns to maze games with the added quirk of different personalities for each enemy Karate Champ 1984 later introduced AI patterns to fighting games First Queen 1988 was a tactical action RPG which featured characters that can be controlled by the computer s AI in following the leader 13 14 The role playing video game Dragon Quest IV 1990 introduced a Tactics system where the user can adjust the AI routines of non player characters during battle a concept later introduced to the action role playing game genre by Secret of Mana 1993 Games like Madden Football Earl Weaver Baseball and Tony La Russa Baseball all based their AI in an attempt to duplicate on the computer the coaching or managerial style of the selected celebrity Madden Weaver and La Russa all did extensive work with these game development teams to maximize the accuracy of the games citation needed Later sports titles allowed users to tune variables in the AI to produce a player defined managerial or coaching strategy The emergence of new game genres in the 1990s prompted the use of formal AI tools like finite state machines Real time strategy games taxed the AI with many objects incomplete information pathfinding problems real time decisions and economic planning among other things 15 The first games of the genre had notorious problems Herzog Zwei 1989 for example had almost broken pathfinding and very basic three state state machines for unit control and Dune II 1992 attacked the players base in a beeline and used numerous cheats 16 Later games in the genre exhibited more sophisticated AI Later games have used bottom up AI methods such as the emergent behaviour and evaluation of player actions in games like Creatures or Black amp White Facade interactive story was released in 2005 and used interactive multiple way dialogs and AI as the main aspect of game A robot goes for the ball and competes in Robocup Games have provided an environment for developing artificial intelligence with potential applications beyond gameplay Examples include Watson a Jeopardy playing computer and the RoboCup tournament where robots are trained to compete in soccer 17 Views EditMany experts complain that the AI in the term game AI overstates its worth as game AI is not about intelligence and shares few of the objectives of the academic field of AI Whereas real AI addresses fields of machine learning decision making based on arbitrary data input and even the ultimate goal of strong AI that can reason game AI often consists of a half dozen rules of thumb or heuristics that are just enough to give a good gameplay experience citation needed Historically academic game AI projects have been relatively separate from commercial products because the academic approaches tended to be simple and non scalable Commercial game AI has developed its own set of tools which have been sufficient to give good performance in many cases 2 Game developers increasing awareness of academic AI and a growing interest in computer games by the academic community is causing the definition of what counts as AI in a game to become less idiosyncratic Nevertheless significant differences between different application domains of AI mean that game AI can still be viewed as a distinct subfield of AI In particular the ability to legitimately solve some AI problems in games by cheating creates an important distinction For example inferring the position of an unseen object from past observations can be a difficult problem when AI is applied to robotics but in a computer game a NPC can simply look up the position in the game s scene graph Such cheating can lead to unrealistic behavior and so is not always desirable But its possibility serves to distinguish game AI and leads to new problems to solve such as when and how to cheat citation needed The major limitation to strong AI is the inherent depth of thinking and the extreme complexity of the decision making process This means that although it would be then theoretically possible to make smart AI the problem would take considerable processing power citation needed Usage EditIn computer simulations of board games Edit Computer chess Computer shogi Computer Go Computer checkers Computer Othello Computer poker players Akinator Computer Arimaa Logistello which plays Reversi Rog O Matic which plays Rogue Computer players of Scrabble A variety of board games in the Computer Olympiad General game playing Solved games have a computer strategy which is guaranteed to be optimal and in some cases force a win or draw In modern video games Edit Further information Video game bot Game AI heuristic algorithms are used in a wide variety of quite disparate fields inside a game The most obvious is in the control of any NPCs in the game although scripting decision tree is currently the most common means of control 18 These handwritten decision trees often result in artificial stupidity such as repetitive behavior loss of immersion or abnormal behavior in situations the developers did not plan for 19 Pathfinding another common use for AI is widely seen in real time strategy games Pathfinding is the method for determining how to get a NPC from one point on a map to another taking into consideration the terrain obstacles and possibly fog of war 20 21 Commercial videogames often use fast and simple grid based pathfinding wherein the terrain is mapped onto a rigid grid of uniform squares and a pathfinding algorithm such as A or IDA is applied to the grid 22 23 24 Instead of just a rigid grid some games use irregular polygons and assemble a navigation mesh out of the areas of the map that NPCs can walk to 22 25 As a third method it is sometimes convenient for developers to manually select waypoints that NPCs should use to navigate the cost is that such waypoints can create unnatural looking movement In addition waypoints tend to perform worse than navigation meshes in complex environments 26 27 Beyond static pathfinding navigation is a sub field of Game AI focusing on giving NPCs the capability to navigate in a dynamic environment finding a path to a target while avoiding collisions with other entities other NPC players or collaborating with them group navigation citation needed Navigation in dynamic strategy games with large numbers of units such as Age of Empires 1997 or Civilization V 2010 often performs poorly units often get in the way of other units 27 Rather than improve the Game AI to properly solve a difficult problem in the virtual environment it is often more cost effective to just modify the scenario to be more tractable If pathfinding gets bogged down over a specific obstacle a developer may just end up moving or deleting the obstacle 28 In Half Life 1998 the pathfinding algorithm sometimes failed to find a reasonable way for all the NPCs to evade a thrown grenade rather than allow the NPCs to attempt to bumble out of the way and risk appearing stupid the developers instead scripted the NPCs to crouch down and cover in place in that situation 29 Video game combat AI Edit Many contemporary video games fall under the category of action first person shooter or adventure In most of these types of games there is some level of combat that takes place The AI s ability to be efficient in combat is important in these genres A common goal today is to make the AI more human or at least appear so One of the more positive and efficient features found in modern day video game AI is the ability to hunt AI originally reacted in a very black and white manner If the player were in a specific area then the AI would react in either a complete offensive manner or be entirely defensive In recent years the idea of hunting has been introduced in this hunting state the AI will look for realistic markers such as sounds made by the character or footprints they may have left behind 30 These developments ultimately allow for a more complex form of play With this feature the player can actually consider how to approach or avoid an enemy This is a feature that is particularly prevalent in the stealth genre Another development in recent game AI has been the development of survival instinct In game computers can recognize different objects in an environment and determine whether it is beneficial or detrimental to its survival Like a user the AI can look for cover in a firefight before taking actions that would leave it otherwise vulnerable such as reloading a weapon or throwing a grenade There can be set markers that tell it when to react in a certain way For example if the AI is given a command to check its health throughout a game then further commands can be set so that it reacts a specific way at a certain percentage of health If the health is below a certain threshold then the AI can be set to run away from the player and avoid it until another function is triggered Another example could be if the AI notices it is out of bullets it will find a cover object and hide behind it until it has reloaded Actions like these make the AI seem more human However there is still a need for improvement in this area Another side effect of combat AI occurs when two AI controlled characters encounter each other first popularized in the id Software game Doom so called monster infighting can break out in certain situations Specifically AI agents that are programmed to respond to hostile attacks will sometimes attack each other if their cohort s attacks land too close to them citation needed In the case of Doom published gameplay manuals even suggest taking advantage of monster infighting in order to survive certain levels and difficulty settings Monte Carlo tree search method Edit Game AI often amounts to pathfinding and finite state machines Pathfinding gets the AI from point A to point B usually in the most direct way possible State machines permit transitioning between different behaviors The Monte Carlo tree search method 31 provides a more engaging game experience by creating additional obstacles for the player to overcome The MCTS consists of a tree diagram in which the AI essentially plays tic tac toe Depending on the outcome it selects a pathway yielding the next obstacle for the player In complex video games these trees may have more branches provided that the player can come up with several strategies to surpass the obstacle In this 2022 year s survey 32 you can learn about recent applications of the MCTS algorithm in various game domains such as perfect information combinatorial games strategy games including RTS card games etc Uses in games beyond NPCs Edit Academic AI may play a role within Game AI outside the traditional concern of controlling NPC behavior Georgios N Yannakakis highlighted four potential application areas 2 Player experience modeling Discerning the ability and emotional state of the player so as to tailor the game appropriately This can include dynamic game difficulty balancing which consists in adjusting the difficulty in a video game in real time based on the player s ability Game AI may also help deduce player intent such as gesture recognition Procedural content generation Creating elements of the game environment like environmental conditions levels and even music in an automated way AI methods can generate new content or interactive stories Data mining on user behavior This allows game designers to explore how people use the game what parts they play most and what causes them to stop playing allowing developers to tune gameplay or improve monetization Alternate approaches to NPCs These include changing the game set up to enhance NPC believability and exploring social rather than individual NPC behavior Rather than procedural generation some researchers have used generative adversarial networks GANs to create new content In 2018 researchers at Cornwall University trained a GAN on a thousand human created levels for DOOM 1993 following training the neural net prototype was able to design new playable levels on its own Similarly researchers at the University of California prototyped a GAN to generate levels for Super Mario 33 In 2020 Nvidia displayed a GAN created clone of Pac Man the GAN learned how to recreate the game by watching 50 000 mostly bot generated playthroughs 34 Cheating AI EditGamers always ask if the AI cheats presumably so they can complain if they lose Terry Lee Coleman of Computer Gaming World 1994 35 In the context of artificial intelligence in video games cheating refers to the programmer giving agents actions and access to information that would be unavailable to the player in the same situation 36 Believing that the Atari 8 bit could not compete against a human player Chris Crawford did not fix a bug in Eastern Front 1941 that benefited the computer controlled Russian side 37 Computer Gaming World in 1994 reported that It is a well known fact that many AIs cheat or at least fudge in order to be able to keep up with human players 38 For example if the agents want to know if the player is nearby they can either be given complex human like sensors seeing hearing etc or they can cheat by simply asking the game engine for the player s position Common variations include giving AIs higher speeds in racing games to catch up to the player or spawning them in advantageous positions in first person shooters The use of cheating in AI shows the limitations of the intelligence achievable artificially generally speaking in games where strategic creativity is important humans could easily beat the AI after a minimum of trial and error if it were not for this advantage Cheating is often implemented for performance reasons where in many cases it may be considered acceptable as long as the effect is not obvious to the player While cheating refers only to privileges given specifically to the AI it does not include the inhuman swiftness and precision natural to a computer a player might call the computer s inherent advantages cheating if they result in the agent acting unlike a human player 36 Sid Meier stated that he omitted multiplayer alliances in Civilization because he found that the computer was almost as good as humans in using them which caused players to think that the computer was cheating 39 Developers say that most game AIs are honest but they dislike players erroneously complaining about cheating AI In addition humans use tactics against computers that they would not against other people 37 Examples EditIn the 1996 game Creatures the user hatches small furry animals and teaches them how to behave These Norns can talk feed themselves and protect themselves against vicious creatures It was the first popular application of machine learning in an interactive simulation Neural networks are used by the creatures to learn what to do The game is regarded as a breakthrough in artificial life research which aims to model the behavior of creatures interacting with their environment 40 In the 2001 first person shooter Halo Combat Evolved the player assumes the role of the Master Chief battling various aliens on foot or in vehicles Enemies use cover very wisely and employ suppressing fire and grenades The squad situation affects the individuals so certain enemies flee when their leader dies Attention is paid to the little details with enemies notably throwing back grenades or team members responding to being bothered The underlying behavior tree technology has become very popular in the games industry since Halo 2 40 The 2005 psychological horror first person shooter F E A R has player characters engage a battalion of cloned super soldiers robots and paranormal creatures The AI uses a planner to generate context sensitive behaviors the first time in a mainstream game This technology is still used as a reference for many studios The Replicas are capable of utilizing the game environment to their advantage such as overturning tables and shelves to create cover opening doors crashing through windows or even noticing and alerting the rest of their comrades to the player s flashlight In addition the AI is also capable of performing flanking maneuvers using suppressing fire throwing grenades to flush the player out of cover and even playing dead Most of these actions in particular the flanking is the result of emergent behavior 41 42 The survival horror series S T A L K E R 2007 confronts the player with man made experiments military soldiers and mercenaries known as Stalkers The various encountered enemies if the difficulty level is set to its highest use combat tactics and behaviors such as healing wounded allies giving orders out flanking the player and using weapons with pinpoint accuracy citation needed The 2010 real time strategy game StarCraft II Wings of Liberty gives the player control of one of three factions in a 1v1 2v2 or 3v3 battle arena The player must defeat their opponents by destroying all their units and bases This is accomplished by creating units that are effective at countering opponents units Players can play against multiple different levels of AI difficulty ranging from very easy to Cheater 3 insane The AI is able to cheat at the difficulty Cheater 1 vision where it can see units and bases when a player in the same situation could not Cheater 2 gives the AI extra resources while Cheater 3 gives an extensive advantage over its opponent 43 See also Edit Video games portalApplications of artificial intelligence Applications of intelligence exhibited by machines Behavior selection algorithm Algorithm that selects actions for intelligent agents Machine learning in video games Overview of the use of machine learning in several video games Video game bot Type of artificial intelligence based expert system software Simulated reality Hypothesis that reality could be simulated Utility system a robust technique for decision making in video games Kynapse game AI middleware specializing in path finding and spatial reasoning AiLive A suite of game AI middleware xaitment graphical game AI softwareListsList of emerging technologies List of game AI middleware Outline of artificial intelligenceReferences Edit a b Grant Eugene F Lardner Rex 2 August 1952 The Talk of the Town It The New Yorker a b c Yannakakis Geogios N 2012 Game AI revisited PDF Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Computing Frontiers 285 292 doi 10 1145 2212908 2212954 ISBN 9781450312158 S2CID 4335529 Archived PDF from the original on 8 August 2014 a b c Bogost Ian March 2017 Artificial Intelligence Has Become Meaningless Retrieved 22 July 2017 a b c Kaplan Jerry March 2017 AI s PR Problem MIT Technology Review a b c Eaton Eric Dietterich Tom Gini Maria December 2015 Who Speaks for AI AI Matters 2 2 4 14 doi 10 1145 2847557 2847559 S2CID 207233310 How artificial intelligence will revolutionize the way video games are developed and played 6 March 2019 Why gaming AI won t help make AI work in the real world but could 30 August 2018 Eastwood Gary How video game AI is changing the world CIO Archived from the original on 28 February 2017 Retrieved 28 February 2017 Why video games and board games aren t a good measure of AI intelligence 19 December 2019 See A Brief History of Computing at AlanTuring net Schaeffer Jonathan One Jump Ahead Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers 1997 2009 Springer ISBN 978 0 387 76575 4 Chapter 6 McCorduck Pamela 2004 Machines Who Think 2nd ed Natick MA A K Peters Ltd ISBN 1 56881 205 1 pp 480 483 First Queen at MobyGames Official Site Kure Software Koubou Retrieved 19 May 2011 Translation Schwab 2004 pp 97 112 Schwab 2004 p 107 Emergent Intelligence in Games Archived 19 February 2011 at the Wayback Machine17 February 2011 Good Owen S 5 August 2017 Skyrim mod makes NPC interactions less scripted more Sims like Polygon Retrieved 16 April 2018 Lara Cabrera R Nogueira Collazo M Cotta C amp Fernandez Leiva A J 2015 Game artificial intelligence challenges for the scientific community Yannakakis G N 2012 May Game AI revisited In Proceedings of the 9th conference on Computing Frontiers pp 285 292 ACM Hagelback Johan and Stefan J Johansson Dealing with fog of war in a real time strategy game environment In Computational Intelligence and Games 2008 CIG 08 IEEE Symposium On pp 55 62 IEEE 2008 a b Abd Algfoor Zeyad Sunar Mohd Shahrizal Kolivand Hoshang 2015 A Comprehensive Study on Pathfinding Techniques for Robotics and Video Games International Journal of Computer Games Technology 2015 1 11 doi 10 1155 2015 736138 Yap Peter Grid based path finding In Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence pp 44 55 Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2002 Sturtevant N R June 2012 Benchmarks for Grid Based Pathfinding IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 4 2 144 148 doi 10 1109 TCIAIG 2012 2197681 S2CID 2864753 Goodwin S D Menon S amp Price R G 2006 Pathfinding in open terrain In Proceedings of International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology Nareyek A 2004 AI in computer games Queue 1 10 a b Cui X amp Shi H 2011 A based pathfinding in modern computer games International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security 11 1 125 130 Design Techniques and Ideals for Video Games Byte Magazine Vol 7 no 12 1982 p 100 Liden L 2003 Artificial stupidity The art of intentional mistakes AI game programming wisdom 2 41 48 Schreiner Tim Artificial Intelligence in Game Design Artificial Intelligence Depot Web 19 November 2009 AI depot com Archived 10 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine Statt Nick 9 March 2019 HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY VIDEO GAMES ARE DEVELOPED AND PLAYED Retrieved 23 February 2020 Swiechowski Maciej Godlewski Konrad Sawicki Bartosz Mandziuk Jacek 2022 Monte Carlo Tree Search a review of recent modifications and applications Artificial Intelligence Review doi 10 1007 s10462 022 10228 y S2CID 232147848 a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a CS1 maint url status link AI creates new levels for Doom BBC News 8 May 2018 Retrieved 17 May 2018 Vincent James 22 May 2020 Nvidia s AI recreates Pac Man from scratch just by watching it being played The Verge Retrieved 28 May 2020 Coleman Terry Lee July 1994 He Ain t Heavy He s My Sovereign Computer Gaming World pp 110 111 a b Scott Bob 2002 The Illusion of Intelligence In Rabin Steve ed AI Game Programming Wisdom Charles River Media pp 16 20 a b Wilson Johnny L Brown Ken Lombardi Chris Weksler Mike Coleman Terry July 1994 The Designer s Dilemma The Eighth Computer Game Developers Conference Computer Gaming World pp 26 31 Wilson Johnny L February 1994 Mea Culpas And Culpability Editorial Computer Gaming World p 8 The 7th International Computer Game Developers Conference Computer Gaming World July 1993 p 34 Retrieved 12 July 2014 a b AiGameDev Top 10 Most Influential AI Games Horti Samuel 3 April 2017 Why F E A R s AI is still the best in first person shooters Rock Paper Shotgun Retrieved 29 December 2020 Building the AI of F E A R with Goal Oriented Action Planning gamasutra com 7 May 2020 Retrieved 29 December 2020 StarCraft II StarCraft II Retrieved 28 February 2017 Bibliography EditBogost Ian 2017 Artificial Intelligence Has Become Meaningless 1 Bourg Seemann 2004 AI for Game Developers O Reilly amp Associates ISBN 0 596 00555 5 Buckland 2002 AI Techniques for Game Programming Muska amp Lipman ISBN 1 931841 08 X Buckland 2004 Programming Game AI By Example Wordware Publishing ISBN 1 55622 078 2 Champandard 2003 AI Game Development New Riders ISBN 1 59273 004 3 Eaton Eric et al 2015 Who speaks for AI 2 Funge 1999 AI for Animation and Games A Cognitive Modeling Approach A K Peters ISBN 1 56881 103 9 Funge 2004 Artificial Intelligence for Computer Games An Introduction A K Peters ISBN 1 56881 208 6 Kaplan Jerry 2017 AI s PR Problem 3 Millington 2005 Artificial Intelligence for Games Archived 4 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine Morgan Kaufmann ISBN 0 12 497782 0 Schwab 2004 AI Game Engine Programming Charles River Media ISBN 1 58450 344 0 Smed and Hakonen 2006 Algorithms and Networking for Computer Games John Wiley amp Sons ISBN 0 470 01812 7 External links EditSpecial Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence IGDA AI Game Programming Wisdom on aiwisdom com Georgios N Yannakakis and Julian Togelius Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Artificial intelligence in video games amp oldid 1134565601, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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