#practical artificial intelligence

[willsheperdson]

A roadmap to using Artificial Intelligence

Thinking about leveraging AI in your organization? Perplexed about which use cases and technologies would be relevant, what sorts of data to mine, how to budget for it, how to build skilled teams and

[askagamedev]

Is it just a myth, or does sometimes AI features, that are more marketable and produce necessary "wows", get higher priorities (money, development time, computation time) on expense of overall quality of the AI? Or is it simply more difficult to make the AI constantly not to look bad?

The problem is that nobody really agrees on what “good” AI is. Is it AI that is difficult to defeat? Is it AI that emulates actual human psychology when making decisions? Is it AI that is fun for players to engage with and defeat? Nobody really agrees as to which of these criteria is actually what qualifies AI as “good”, least of all players. Players are really really good at saying they want one thing, but their actual behavior over time shows that they overwhelmingly prefer another thing altogether.

AI in general isn’t particularly marketable. If we devs can’t agree on what good AI is, players certainly don’t understand what it is. Their spending behavior shows that they’d generally rather see a game with “65+ hours of gameplay”, “epic storyline”, “fast-paced action”, “responsive controls”, “60 fps at 1080p”, etc. than “Intelligent AI”. It’s really hard to market something that nobody can agree on. Since players don’t really know what they want in terms of AI, we devs don’t spend quite that much time on it. Our main operating goal when it comes to AI is (usually) to create something that is fun and engaging to defeat. However, this means that the enemy AI must be predictable and solvable to the player, more like a puzzle than an actual problem-solving entity. Players generally don’t react well to AI that outsmarts them. Most of the time they get frustrated and think that it’s cheating.

[askagamedev]

if you could live one day where artificial intelligence was real what would it be like? could you describe what your day would be like if technology had a human personality like an angry atm machine or a bowel mouth toilet?

This question does seem to delve more into the philosophical than the practical, but I’ve done a bit of work in the field of artificial intelligence, so I’ll bite.

When you’re looking at designing artificial intelligence, you’ve got two major camps. The first is to create something that will pass the Turing test. That is, to create something whose responses are indistinguishable from a human being’s. This is pretty much just purely theoretical. The AI here would have to be able to parse inputs from people and respond accordingly. Once the AI could adequately make decisions like a person, it would then be able to go on and add priorities, self-improvement, and increase its knowledge base in a more traditional way. This would be the sort of AI that would get angry, sad, happy, or frustrated, because emulation of human behavior is the goal. This sort of AI is generally developed at research universities and R&D programs simply in a theoretical exercise of seeing whether it can be done. Much like building a computer to play chess, it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose other than “Can it be done?” Research scientists are hard at work trying to prove the answer is “yes”.

The other camp of AI is that designed for a practical purpose, like the sort that exists in games. This sort of AI is built with a specific goal in mind, and any iteration on it would serve to further that particular goal. For other goals (such as an ATM machine) the focus of the AI is to emulate a bank teller to provide a user whatever services are needed at the bank without needing a living, breathing human to parse the necessary information. In that regard, anyone funding the development of such an AI would want to spend his or her money on the data parsing, and less on the human emulation. Much like a sarcastic or foul-mouthed cashier at a restaurant or coffee shop doesn’t add particularly much to the experience, adding such things to a directed AI would not be useful unless it is solely to put the user at ease. That effort in research and development would be much better spent working on recognizing and understanding all of the possible tasks that a user could possibly attempt to engage in with a teller, and then being able to recognize the various ways those tasks can be asked for.

As an example, let’s say that you want to apply for an auto loan in order to buy a car. This sort of task is currently outside the scope of an ATM, but with a sufficiently developed AI, it could handle the majority of the work necessary. It would need to understand what information is necessary to begin a loan application process, and how to calculate things like an applicant’s factors such as credit rating, job status, whether there is a co-signer, any mitigating circumstances, and things like that. It would need to be able to understand what sort of common issues might come up, adjust its internal metric for grading whether an applicant is an acceptable credit risk. The benefits to this, of course, would be that customers seeking loans could then get them nearly instantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without needing to keep staff working around the clock. The benefits here would be to the automation of the processes and increasing efficiency by being able to ask for, parse, and process the necessary information that a customer provides.

In game development, that goal would be to provide a challenge to the player and to be enjoyably beaten. There have been experiments in this arena, in games like Left 4 Dead with its AI Director where there is a perpetually running algorithm that will purposely attempt to vary the amount of tension in a Left 4 Dead run to provide a more varied experience. It does so by choosing which sections of the map have zombies, and which don’t. It also chooses when to spawn the special enemy zombies, and attempts to build tension through audio and visual cues. By periodically building up tension and then releasing it at key moments, it is intended to provide a fun and repeatable experience that doesn’t get as repetitive. It isn’t perfect, but it is an example of using procedural game design to create content. Instead of creating the content him or herself, the designer sets the rules and the game creates itself.

There is a tradeoff, of course... you lose out on the specific authored touches. Things like a specific camera angle, or a specially constructed scene won't necessarily work with primitive procedurally generated content, much like how the levels in Diablo 3 feel rather generic and haphazardly put together. However, as procedural algorithms become more advanced and more capable, designers will add more such things to their own repertoires, and they will become better at crafting more interesting and engaging content.

I think that the future of AI will actually end up taking over content creation. Our ultimate goal is to let the machinery do the work and the effort while we can do things like the creative parts. We already have tools like Maya, Max, Motion Builder, etc. to create the content we use. The next evolution would be to abstract the need for this and to get the computers to write the majority of the code for us and generate the assets we want after we define an art style and are able to establish rules and systems via plain language rather than complicated proprietary scripting languages. In such a situation, far in the future, we won't need specialists to create content anymore because they won't be needed. The AI would be able to generate the content itself, and all we'd need to do is give it the direction.