'Quake III Arena' Bots Reportedly Stop Fighting After 4-Year Match

OliC · on July 4, 2013

This is simply not true. From John Carmack's Twitter: "Stock Quake 3 bots don't use neural networks, folks" (https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/352192259418103809)

rainforest · on July 4, 2013

From John Carmack himself: the stock bots don't use neural nets [1]. It would be interesting to see what sort of emergent behaviour arises from bots that can adapt though.

[1] : https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/352192259418103809

jcfrei · on July 4, 2013

it's ridiculous what kind of pseudo journalism makes it into forbes these days.

diggan · on July 4, 2013

"The story is based on a screenshot[0] taken from a forum and tweeted out by Mat Murray on Twitter."

Yeah, it feels nice that a media company like Forbes is basing their stories on something like a screenshot from 4chan.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/dx7sVXj.jpg

raymondduke · on July 4, 2013

The guy that wrote this is a contributor to Forbes. Anyone can be a contributor to the site as long as they write a few stories that sound like they know what they're talking about.

dTal · on July 4, 2013

Even if it's not true, in some sense it doesn't matter. It makes for a lovely modern-day parable, and also a round-the-campfire sci-fi story.

Cthulhu_ · on July 4, 2013

They stop fighting because some counter overflows, and there's no guard for it causing the application to crash. I'm sure there's smart people - or even Carmack himself - that can find the relevant code (actually, is the bot code open source or just the Quake 3 engine)?

onedognight · on July 4, 2013

This is obviously a joke, but the people at RAND used to run into this when doing war simulations for the US Military.

aviraldg · on July 4, 2013

The only winning move is not to play.

ziko · on July 4, 2013

I'd like to see what's inside that 512MB file, though.

wooptoo · on July 4, 2013

Another epic troll brought to you by 4chan.

OGC · on July 4, 2013

Good god is that stupid. This originated on _4chan_ and has been thorougly debunked, because Quake 3 bots don't work like that. Fucking ridiculous.