
Game AI Pro - SimplyUseless
http://www.gameaipro.com/
======
MAXPOOL
I am just an NPC until I get coffee.

For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It's cheap tricks and obviously fake
but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a new trick you want to try in real
life.

Marvin Minsky once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge." If I had to bet,
I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks, incomplete solutions,
shortcuts and artificially limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and
avoid tigers, not to understand the world. Combining many tricks together can
create illusion of generality that is very convincing.

~~~
nwienert
I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain
is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people
think they know are not tricks at all.

Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was
useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks”
were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked.

I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the
incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really
understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just
don’t really know well yet.

~~~
robotresearcher
> I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the
> incredible complex things we do

But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.

~~~
nwienert
Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is
fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no
duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things -
it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not
kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how
humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked.

Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.

~~~
grawprog
>I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility,
adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts.

Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the
human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad
thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a
whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people each with
their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us
does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their
shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at
things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations
and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of
years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we
hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.

~~~
nwienert
I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what
worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long
period of time.

It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape
analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar
opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct
tape if you want to get anywhere useful. Meanwhile a brain literally requires
as little duct tape as possible if you want it to be generally good.

~~~
grawprog
>It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape
analogy.

I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the way I learn and the
way i've watched other people learn or the way i've seen people learn while
i've been teaching them or training them. That and the general way everything
kind of works. As amazing as everything in the world seems, when you break
everything down to the smallest components, they all rely on the same skills
and techniques we've been using since we were picking berries and hunting
mammoths. The materials, accuracy and scales of our work have changed and
improved dramatically, but fundamentally, most of what we do can be traced
back to the same old things we've always done. We're just really good at
building on layers and layers of things and applying things and knowledge to
novel concepts and ideas.

Take music for an example, we just keep making the same music over and over
and over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make it sound
different and new to the point where most people don't realize they've been
listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at
least.

~~~
joenot443
> we just keep making the same music over and over and over again, yet we
> still find new and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the
> point where most people don't realize they've been listening to the same few
> songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.

What do you mean by this? Oftentimes I see people reaching the conclusion that
because a lot of modern music is built around the same major scales and
largely homogenous chord progressions, it must be the same, but this simply
isn't the case.

~~~
grawprog
>a lot of modern music is built around the same major scales and largely
homogenous chord progressions, it must be the same, but this simply isn't the
case.

But it is, to the point where there's songs I learn only somewhat and i'll get
confused to which lyrics are which and I'll sing a mix of the two songs when
playing them, imagine and no woman no cry jump are two it happens to me with
all the time. Same with truly madly deeply and kryptonite oddly enough. Then
there's the whole pachabel's canon meme which is entirely true. There's a few
songs, the most recent is some maroon 5 and i think a jonas brother's song
which I was confused as hell as to why I liked until I realized they're just
another rework of canon.

That's not even getting started on the direct ripoffs such as the 1000'@ of
songs based on the Amen break or the thousands of songs that are basically a
simple 8 or 12 bar blues progression or the tangled web of constant remakes
that is reggae and dancehall and every song that lifts a bassline or melody
from them without credit all the way up to such obscure things as the friendly
neighbours tune from earthbound being a relick of the real rock riddim.

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fxtentacle
What a generous gift :)

And even though they gave a talk about in in 2015, their "Simplest AI Trick in
the Book" is still not implemented by some games released nowadays.

In case you don't know it, it's:

0.2s reaction time for aiming

\+ 0.4s reaction time for yes/no decisions

\+ additional delay for ambiguity, surprise, or limited visibility

I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. Just seeing your opponent taking a
moment to think makes whatever it is they do so much more convincing.

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thebrain
Download it all with

wget -r -A.pdf [http://www.gameaipro.com/](http://www.gameaipro.com/)

wget -r -A.zip [http://www.gameaipro.com/](http://www.gameaipro.com/)

~~~
fxtentacle
That seems a bit rude to me, especially since they

a) sell PDF ebooks

and

b) explicitly say that you are not supposed to re-upload the content
elsewhere.

~~~
oliwarner
Why? They've made this all available, why is grabbing it all in increase your
own convenience (eg offline reading, searching) _rude_?

~~~
fxtentacle
Because when you actually read it, you will download 1 article per 30 minutes.
If you batch-download all of their content now, you'll create much more peak
load and, hence, costs for them.

~~~
oliwarner
You can use --limit-rate=500k if you want to limit the bandwidth you're
consuming.

And load does not translate to cost for everybody. If you saturate the
connection to my VPS, I don't pay more, it just gets slower for everybody in
contention. I _can_ spin up mirrors but if I'm offering a free resource like
this, I'd be more likely to limit the bandwidth-per-client-IP or just actively
let it run slow. They could even limit the bandwith to the subdirectory
with...

    
    
        location /download/ {
            limit_conn addr 1;
            limit_rate 50k;
        }

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bdickason
Very cool. I always expect a link like this to either be some super basic
examples (e.g. how to implement flocking) or articles detailing techniques
used in games from ~20 years ago.

Very cool how recent and modern these are (along with super reputable authors)

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KenanSulayman
Is this directly from the authors? If yes, I'm a bit shocked given the prices
for the book when searching for ed 1, ed 2 and ed 3 on Google. Please add a
donation button to the site.

I just finished the first four sections and I love it. Thanks a lot!

~~~
runevault
They always do this when the next version of the book is close to coming out.
The first 2 have been available for free for a while. It is expected with this
that the 4th is coming soon.

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Buttons840
I've been thinking a lot about trying to make an AI for a turn based 4X game.
I believe an AI that could defeat the strongest human players in (for example)
Civilization would be more impressive than AlphaStar and the Dota AIs.

I think it might give the gaming industry a kick in the pants to start
utilizing more advance AI techniques in general, since it seems almost all
discussions of strong AI in games are dominated by apologists explaining why
it's not practical. Just one example of strong AI in a successful game would
change the industry.

After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of
dumbing them down in fun ways.

~~~
Namrog84
> After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more interesting task of
> dumbing them down in fun ways

An artificially handicapped or limited smart ai in video games is often
obvious and not fun.

~~~
Buttons840
I don't know about that, I much prefer playing chess video games against an
artificially limited AI. Granted you did say "often", and I agree this is the
exception.

Starting with an AI that is weaker than human players, and then artificially
limiting it even further does not produce a great AI. Although, some players
still choose to play against these easiest of AIs.

I believe starting with an AI that is far stronger than any human, and then
artificially limiting it will be fun. This is a fundamentally different
situation. This is like a chess engine, no human can hope to win without some
artificial limitations on the AI. This is a type of AI we have never
experience outside of a few abstract board games like chess. I look forward to
seeing AIs like this come to 4X style games such as Civilization.

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dmix
> Unfortunately, the time between seeing a decision acted out and the actual
> act of making that decision can mean that all relevant information has
> already been discarded. Ideally if the entire game simu-lation could be
> rewound to the exact moment in time when the error occurred, it would make
> notoriously difficult problems to debug, trivial to understand why they
> occurred.

> Game engines have typically made reproducing these types of problems easier
> using deterministic playback methods (Dickinson 2001), where the entire
> state of the game simu-lation can jump back in time and resimulate the same
> problem over and over (Llopis 2008).

Imagine if you could do this for _all_ programming? [from chapter 6]

~~~
anarazel
> Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from chapter 6]

rr comes pretty close. [https://rr-project.org/](https://rr-project.org/)

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spmealin
What a cool and useful resource. Unfortunately, all of the pdf files are
inaccessible to assistive technology (such as screen readers).

~~~
bmn__
What makes you think so? I tested book 3 chapter 1 with Okular and Festival
plugin, works fine.

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syspec
The RVO chapter, and that concept I general is an amazing one because they
really created a method for 2 autonomous characters avoiding collisions on a
natural way - with code that is easy to understand

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hesdeadjim
Love these books. Two techniques I’ve found hugely valuable in practice are
utility-based AI and flow field pathfinding/goal seeking.

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SergeAx
Shouldn't it have (2017) in title?

~~~
SloopJon
"All chapters are available to download as of September 2019."

~~~
SergeAx
As Hacker News is mostly informational resource, it is important when the
information was produced, not when it became free of charge.

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coder1001
Thank! Nice to see people releasing this kind of material for free!

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mottosso
Does anyone know the reason why they suddenly became free?

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Jahak
Thank you very much!

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m3kw9
Yeah this is awesome

