

How to Incorporate Stupidity Into Your AI Code - arem
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3947/intelligent_mistakes_how_to_.php

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chops
Very clever, and it's probably true that "intelligent mistakes" are the keys
to believable and (more importantly) to enjoyable gamer experience, especially
in the domain of games where everything is known and completely predictable
(such as in his example with billiards).

Fascinating stuff indeed.

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malkia
Great article from Mick!

This also reminds how the folks from New World Computing (Heroes Of Might of
Magic) were forced to dumb down the AI, so it's more interresting,
challenging...

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dfranke
Artificial stupidity? Isn't there already enough of the real McCoy?

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patio11
It is worthwhile taking this joke as serious, because the perspective on why
we need AI at all is enlightening.

Take WoW, for example. Right now there are several million players logged in,
busy beating the tar out of several million bad guys who are _programmed to
lose_. They are playing, and paying good money, to have the _illusion_ of
challenge while winning the overwhelming majority of all encounters. (Why
can't PVP replace this for most players? Because PVP implies someone is losing
and the overwhelming majority of players want to decisively win the
overwhelming majority of encounters. There is no way to accomplish those
things without instructing a non-player to throw their matches.)

Let's say we replaced the AI with hired actors who played the monsters, and
played poorly. Heck, we'll say the actors can even multitask 4 monsters at a
time, all played to a similar level of poorly. At 60 monster-hours (15 man
hours) per month per player, Blizzard would be in the red on accounts just
from the actors salary unless their fully-loaded cost was under $1 a man-hour.
Even if they got away with 40 cent wages for urban China and had minimal
overhead this would slash their margins to bits.

So that's why we have AI: to do jobs humans won't do willingly (losing) at a
price which is cheaper than the cheapest possible human implementation.

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murrayh
We need calculators because it's cheaper than keeping a human with you at all
times to calculate sums for you. That sounds pretty silly, right?

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patio11
To correct your analogy: imagine a world in which humans needed to be
constantly told their math skills were awesome (I don't know, maybe as
confidence building for middle-school girls). In this world, we might have
calculators which were designed to provide the wrong answer, so that people
would type in 36 x 50, get -7 as the answer, and say "Hah, I'm much better at
this than you are."

In this world, which parallels the MMORPG use case, yes, its cheaper to keep a
calculator to be the whipping boy than to keep around a human who has been
instructed to perform math poorly.

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murrayh
I was trying to demonstrate that while the conclusion (use AI because they
lose cheaper than it costs to get humans to lose) is not false, it is far too
broad to be of any use. I can draw that same conclusion for any tool that
humans have used to automate a task.

The idea that the tool's purpose is to lose is tangential.

And I dispute that. AFAIK, the AI in WoW is not designed to lose. A monster
will kill you (win) if it gets the chance. The monster is trying to win (the
AI is designed to win), it just isn't very good (the game is designed so you
win the majority of individual battles).

And I don't think you can make the jump from "the game is designed so that you
win the majority of individual battles" to "the game is not challenging".
Doing so infers that "only games designed so that you do not win the majority
of individual battles are challenging".

And since the basis for the PVP argument is undermined, it is a waste of time
to consider it (regardless of whether it may be true or not).

The reasoning followed from flawed beginnings to a uselessly broad conclusion.

PS. I did intend to post something more thorough the first time, but I ran out
of time and pressure posted only a snippet of my incomplete ramblings.

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pchristensen
The point isn't to make it lose (that would be easy), the point is to _barely_
lose. Human psychology thrives on tasks that are challenging but conquerable.
Losing sucks, trivial challenges suck, so game AI has to be somewhere in
between.

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shellerik
Interesting ideas. I wonder if the perfect AI would study its opponent's moves
and learn to move just as they would, then it would be like the human is
playing against themselves.

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bad_user
It would be really hard ... because it involves studying your intentions
rather than your moves.

In chess this is doable (the intent is clearer after the fact, and the
possible moves are more limited), but think about CStrike for example ... how
is your algorithm going to realize that you're protecting a gate because you
don't want your opponents to sneak behind your teammates? Even simple
questions become hard ... say you're attacking X1 just as a distraction, while
your teammates are attacking X2 ... a team uses slight variations of some
tactic, it's mostly never the same (different men in charge, different
hotspots, switching between X1 and X2, etc ...). Gathering useful statistics
about it requires lots of played games and lots of resources, and I don't
think it's doable on your average gamer's hardware.

I know, stupid example :) but you get the point.

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iron_ball
This is the reason it's difficult to come up with fun AI for head-to-head
fighting games: once you get past the thin veneer of mastering the moves,
they're entirely about mindgames. A FSM-based CPU opponent does not have a
thought process a human player can predict and exploit, nor the ability to
avoid repeated mistakes.

I believe this applies to many other types of games as well, but games with
many split-second paper-scissors-rock decisions suffer the most. A computer
can be programmed to scout out and react to a carrier buildup in Starcraft,
but cannot easily be programmed to outguess a jab/throw mixup in Street
Fighter.

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eru
Don't game theories mixed strategies solve this problem?

After all nobody can beat random selectian at paper-scissors-rock.

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jibiki
My vague recollection is that RPS is the subject of AI competitions. You can't
"beat" random selection, but you can't lose to it either. So if you want to
win a tournament, you have to try to guess what your opponents will do,
assuming that they too want to win, and are guessing your actions.

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eru
Yes. But most programs fall back on pure randomness in those contests when
they have a losing streak.

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Zaak
Your off-world investments in artificial dumbness have paid $150 in dividends.

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critic
Incorporating intelligence is the hard part.

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endtime
Unless you're using 'intelligence' to mean something other than what the
article means by it, incorporating intelligence is _not_ the hard part.

