
A 'Brief' History of Game AI Up to AlphaGo - andreyk
http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/ai/a-brief-history-of-game-ai/
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60654
It's a nice historical overview of using search and ML for formal games like
chess.

But - this is not the game developer usage of "game AI". Where are wargames,
where are artificial characters, where is interactive storytelling, where are
realtime control systems, and so on, and so forth? The doc is missing a lot of
the _actual_ history of game AI, which is much wider and more varied than
presented here (and ML approaches are still in minority).

Anyone interested in game AI history should definitely check out the past
proceedings of the AIIDE conference:
[http://www.aiide.org](http://www.aiide.org)

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ggggtez
What are you talking about. Storytelling is not part of game AI. Not for
Chess. At best, the storytelling can be considered to be purposely making the
AI consider fewer ply of moves, to create a more fun experience for lower
leveled players.

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60654
I can't tell if you're trolling or are just not up to date on game AI, so
assuming the latter: you have to think beyond chess. There's much more info on
interactive storytelling in the AIIDE proceedings I linked to, it's a very
active area of research. Academically it goes back at least to the mid 90s, Oz
project at CMU for example, or MIT Media Lab projects. And in commercial
production, interactive stories are as old as the industry, probably the best
early example is Infocom but back then there wasn't much AI driving it; it's
not until the 2000s that people started actually building "drama managers" for
shipping games to introduce dramatic conflict dynamically.

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ggggtez
You can measure research on lots of directions. The purpose of AlphaGo was to
win the game, so discussion about AI which are not built to win is largely
irrelevant. The difficulty of Go had nothing to do with creating tension
(where in many games humans play, AI players can trivially win if the
designers wanted them to). In Go this was not the case, as AI lagged behind
grandmaster play significantly. Thus, the discussion of research that
interests you that has nothing to do with the goals of Go AI, is tangential at
best. It's not fair to say the article is faulty just because you wanted them
to discuss your favorite research conference.

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richard_shelton
I'm glad that you've mentioned Kaissa, the famous chess program from Soviet
Union.

Kaissa was developed in 1972. Before that, in 1963, there was ITEP (ИТЭФ)
chess program and in 1965 this program won in the international computer chess
match. See details here:
[https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ITEP+Chess+Program#S...](https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ITEP+Chess+Program#Stanford-
ITEP)

By the way, the first computer game in USSR was made in 1957 on computer
Strela-1, the author is Yuri Pervin. It was a variant of Dominoes board game
in the player vs computer mode. The game was described in "Problemi
Kibernetiki", issue 3, pages 171-180.

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andreyk
Very interesting, thanks for the info!

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golergka
Term "Game AI" is usually used in context of game development, where it means
something completely different: not an agent that is optimized for top
perfomance, but an agent that is optimized for maximum player fun. It's a
completely different task, solved with completely different methods.

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glaberficken
>"since then computers have continued to become exponentially faster, and
today humanity’s best Chess players are likely no match for programs you can
run on your smartphone."

Is this really true? Would a smartphone chess app beat the worlds top ranked
player today?

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swebs
>Chess engines continue to improve. In 2009, chess engines running on slower
hardware have reached the grandmaster level. A mobile phone won a category 6
tournament with a performance rating 2898: chess engine Hiarcs 13 running
inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD won the Copa Mercosur
tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw on August 4–14,
2009.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Computers_versu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Computers_versus_humans)

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glaberficken
oh wow! thanks for the link

So, if someone out there can explain, is a program like AlphaGo deterministic?
Meaning if the opponent plays the exact same moves in 2 consecutive games will
the 2nd game be a replica of the first?

My naive guess is that the MTC search part of the algorithm will necessarily
introduce some variation in play, no?

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pixl97
I would be surprised if AG didn't start with a randomly generated seed to
prevent this from happening. Of course that just moves the question to, if you
start with the same seed and do the same moves...

