Artificial Intelligence Koray Kuruoğlu

Turing Test

Challenge the Player Providing a reasonable challenge for players must be the primary goal for AI in any computer game.

Not Do Dumb Things AI for a computer game must not appear overly stupid. Players love laughing at AI when it does something completely foolhardy.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas NPC cops follow the player into the water, but they can't swim and immediately drown.

Symptom NPC cops follow the player into the water, but they can't swim and immediately drown. Cause This kind of situation is one of many special cases that can arise in open worlds, particularly when the NPCs do not have the same abilities as the player. In particular, this bug was caused by the cops either not knowing about the water, or not knowing that they needed a special ability to enter the water. Instead, the cops AI was reactively moving towards the player's position. Cure This was fixed in subsequent releases, presumably by: Adding more information into the navigation graph about the type of environment, in this case annotating volumes as water. Making the cops' pathfinding aware of the water and avoiding it at all cost. The AI would stop before the ledge leading into the water.

Be Unpredictable Humans are unpredictable. That is part of what makes them good opponents in a game and one of the primary reasons that people enjoy playing multi-player games; a skilled person will be challenging to fight in a way that a computer never will “Fuzzy logic” is one method AI designers and programmers may use to keep the AI agents unpredictable and interesting. Essentially, fuzzy logic takes a logical system and inserts some randomness into it. In fuzzy logic, when the AI is presented with a given situation, it has several worthwhile courses of action to choose from instead of just one.

Assist Storytelling

The Sloped Playing Field

How Real Is Too Real? Another potential AI programming pitfall is creating an AI that, though it actually performs like a “real” person, ends up detracting from the gameplay as a result. In terms of the stories they tell and the settings they employ, games are often contrivances, strictly unreal situations that are specifically set up because they are interesting, not because they are authentic, and the AI must support this. The point again is that the AI must never overshadow the gameplay, and it must never distract the development team from the true goal of the project: to make a fun, playable game. If the AI is really very sophisticated but, as a result, the game is unplayable or extremely frustrating, players are not going to remark on the intelligence of the game’s combatants.

AI Agents and Their Environment

How Good Is Good Enough? The AI for a game only needs to be good enough to challenge players while not appearing overly foolish in its actions.

Scripting

Scripting