[Spazmatic]

Originally Posted by There are many possible styles of mud, but no "true" way. Just because something doesn't work well with your approach doesn't mean that it might not work for someone else's.

Amen. After all, hardcore PK muds without safe zones don't leave a lot of room for discourse... And short snippets can be done very well by bots. Just one example, of course.

[Eagleon]

Originally Posted by The reason mankind made it to the moon is because it started off aiming to break the atmosphere, not journey to an adjoining galaxy (which is, for all practical purposes, currently impossible). Breaking the atmosphere was a very lofty goal originally. Escaping the galaxy would have been considerably loftier, of course. The difference is that one was attainable and one was not. Pursuing the unattainable is a waste.

Look at that, right there, what you said. We went past the goal of breaking the atmosphere to eventually land on the moon. I think that if it's possible, however far off it is, we should try for it, and believable AI is definately possible. I wonder what would have happened if we had aimed for the moon originally? We would have broken the atmosphere, because we need to break the atmosphere to do what we want. Of course, we would have then landed on the moon, we already have, it's possible and it was considered impossible for a long time. Would we have gone a step further, though?

Ambition can help fuel great things. What would happen if we decided we wanted to leave the galaxy? We would of course, not be able to do it in the forseeable future, but we'd be working toward the goal. Scientists would start working on propulsion technologies with a renewed effort, and a few would inevitably attempt work on advanced phenomena like wormholes in the hope of getting there much faster. The propulsion research would require more research in materials science to withstand the forces placed on the ship with faster and hotter engines. Life systems (air and waste recycling, medical techniques, and perhaps cryonics), hydroponics, and yes, computers would also all recieve a boost in research. Eventually some attempts will be made, multi-generational colonies launched at sub-light speed, if I guess right. Perhaps these will never get there. Maybe some day we'll give up. But now look at where we are. All that research, all that time spent, has spawned technologies we'd have never dreamed of, including going to the moon. A waste? Hardly.

Think like you're in a space-empire game like Master of Orion. One of the best techniques I've found is setting the loftiest and most powerful technology I can find on the tech charts, and working towards that one thing. Not only will you obtain Advanced Wormhole Engineering (or whatever) much faster than you would the other players, giving you an immense advantage, you've also become less general in your research, and have specialized in that branch of technology so much, you can outperform and maybe crush your opponent with some advanced units that are far from their grasp. (Note that this is a very general example. I know the way to beat this strategy, you don't have to tell it to me. )

I hope that none of you waddle in mud (excuse the pun ) for the rest of your lives thinking that your ideas are unattainable. I'm not, and my philosophy holds strong. I seem to be forcing past the barriers in my life quite well, if you ask me.

Originally Posted by (Spazmatic @ May 26 2003,13:54) Imagine a mud in which say, tell, ooc, etc were all disabled.

Originally Posted by Yui: Muds do not have to rely on English-language communication to take full advantage of the multiplayer aspect of a game world.  One may have a profound playing experience without ever exchanging a word with another human in the game.  In fact in some games I would rather the other players be barred from speaking.

Actually that sounds like an interesting experiment, that is to disable ALL forms of verbal communication.  Create a game in which players cannot express themselves in language (e.g. English) but only in perhaps body and facial gestures, and primitive sounds.

[Spazmatic]

I've not tried it on a mud (so abusable if you left emote in, and I'm not sure I can live without emote!, however... Back in... Beta 6.something, my clan played a CS scrim with no text... The mud was rigged to autokick on say or team_say, and both clans promised (we think they kept it) to not use external voicecom. It was fun! We didn't really plan the strategy, it just happened, people would bob their heads one way for one thing, another way for another thing... And we didn't use radio binds either.

I'm sure it could be done! If we can breach rooms without communication, I'm sure mudders can group!

[enigma@zebedee]

Originally Posted by Of COURSE the fun is what matters! All I am stating is that an A.I. in a mud that can fool me into thinking it's a human doesn't exist and isn't likely to exist in the forseeable future. Sheesh, that shouldn't even be a controversial statement. --matt

Sorry to wind the discussion back a bit but I wish to dispute the foreseable future point.

It took 10 years to go from Wolfenstein (with stupid 'run towards you shooting' enemies) to Unreal Tournament - with enemies that used the same equipment, strategies, and stats as the players.

Where do you think we will be in another 10 years? If the current expansion rate continues (and it seems to be accelerating if anything) then we will have 64* the amount of memory, hard drive, and processor capacity we currently do). Games designers will have had another 10 years to work on their algorithms. AI researchers will have had another 10 years to work on theirs.

I would be very surprised if we didn't have computer AI's that you cannot distinguish from humans by that time. Hook one up to the internet and you could pick your conversation topic and they would know as much about it as Jo Bloggs down the street...

Has anyone read the first 'Otherland' book by Tad Williams? The rest of the series wasn't so good but the first book was stunning and had some very interesting ideas along those lines.

[Garfarel]

Maybe the "going to the moon" approach is not that bad of an example of how to fool
a person into believing something is "real" some people actually think the whole thing
was a scam made by the us government. Without putting my foot in one camp saying it
was or not, just think for second, what if? To make such a scene you would need full
control of what is going on I suppose a coder would have that set of tools to control
the outcome of most actions and behaviours made by a player. Commands are easy as you
know what they do, but as someone else talked about speech is pretty hard to control
as it has pretty much the freedom to be anything. So maybe the first thing to-do is to
divide speech into several types of groups, like questions, demands, answers...etc
putting it into a category would at least give an idea what the player wants. Socials
are a good example how this could work, like 'beckon' ($n beckons for you to follow.)
we could then set up different rules for how the NPC would react upon such an request
like if it’s already in a group, is it a shopkeeper or maybe it has other tasks and would
decline. The basic is to know what the player wants, like if you don’t know the question
it's hard to give a correct answer. For two intelligent creatures to have a conversation
they need to understand each other, or else communication would be pretty hard. Some
animals may be taught to perform certain actions and will get rewarded with food if they
do it right, a mob could have the same guidelines to right and wrong and could learn
from mistakes based on behavior and actions from players or even other mobs. It's pretty
basic actually, but how to do it may be more compliacted. So telling the world they have
been on the moon, might be more easy than going there.

Intelligence is not speech itself, more like a scrap yard of used words that put
together right will make no sense at all.

[Spazmatic]

Originally Posted by Sorry to wind the discussion back a bit but I wish to dispute the foreseable future point.

I'm not so sure I'd dispute that to that degree... Eliza comes from the 60's, and we haven't really gotten far beyond that. I imagine we'll see leaps and bounds in the improvement of many things, including discourse analysis, but to perfect NLP, discourse analysis, knowledgebase use, and more to a Turing Test degree is probably asking a bit much. I imagine, however, if we restrict ourselves to certain subsets, we'll see vast acheivements.

However, to get back to the original topic of the post... For a mud, chances are you want your AI to fool as best as possible, not neccessarily to provide hours of one on one chit-chat... Try logging everything from a player, feeding that to a learning algorithm (Bayesian nets?) and then just letting it run. 99% of the time, it won't know what's going on, especially over a general chat channel, but it can just stay quiet then and seem like a quiet player. It's a simple solution, if far from elegant.

[JusticeJustinian]

Okay, just read this thread (actually skimmed past alot of the useless opinion I'm right you're wrong posts).

Now, making an NPC that actually understands and uses conversation is currently "improbable". There are several people working on writing AI that can hold believable conversation.

I read about one article in particular in Game AI Programming Wisdom where the authors of Black & White were working on NPL (for black and white). They based their work on another project which was a web chatter bot.

The chatter bot's knowledge base was seeded with Monty Python quotes. I don't remember the name, and the site was down when I went to "converse". I'll post that when I get home and can look it up.

Anyhow, on one instance a "deeply religious" person spent 6 hours attempting to get it to say something nice when the name "Jesus Christ" was mentioned. If you've ever watched "Life of Brian" or a variety of other Monty Python quotes, you can imagine what the bot came up with.

The fact is, that humans are excellent pattern matchers. So much so, that we often find excuses for things, given a sufficiently intelligent bot, most people will view it as more intelligent than it really is.

Sure it won't be able to manipulate people into doing things such as a political game would allow, but I'm sure it'd be quite possible to make them have reasonable responses and follow instructions. This allows NPCs to be a part of a "political" oriented game.

Additionally, there's volumes more to AI than language, it just happens to be a particularly difficult problem because, put simply... depending on who you talk to, the same phrase could mean a dozen different things. There's infinite background involved in how humans interpret speech.

A simple thing for example would be a BFS for an NPC that walks out 5 branches, picks one room at that "distance" at random, and uses that for it's destination.

Pretty simple right? It solves several "idiocy" issues that appear with 1 step random movement that most mud's tend to use.

A basic AI for skill usage (not necessarily combat) isn't difficult, and even allowing mobs to recognise new players and help them... hrmm, a newbie is incap here, let me heal him.

Yeah, when you look at AI to attempt to make it indistinquishable from a human, it's easy to find holes, but when you set a goal of making AI indistinguishable from humans and work at it from the ground up....

There's plenty of individual aspects that can be handled, and quickly you'll have extremely intelligent NPC's.

Additionally, you may have thousands of NPC's wandering the game, but advanced AI only needs to be activated for those that are "near" players. This allows you to have complex AI, but not eat up all your resources acheiving it.

Mr. Turing once received a call from the defense department, and they told him that they had a robot that could pass the turning test, and asked him to come over.

He sat in a little room and fielded questions against the bot and it constantly replied with believable responses. The responses were so good that he couldn't tell it was a robot. In fact it was a human, but Turing admitted that as he heard these responses he made excuses for how a computer could possible have said that. It's called managed belief.

I'm sure some of those details are wrong, but the basic story is correct.

Honestly, I've held better conversations with alot of computers than with some people I know...

-- Kwon J. Ekstrom

[JusticeJustinian]

Originally Posted by (Garfarel @ June 08 2003,07:31) divide speech into several types of groups, like questions, demands, answers...etc putting it into a category would at least give an idea what the player wants. Socials are a good example how this could work

Socials could actually be a major form of communication for NPCs, since those are defined on the server you could flag them for certain attributes and further increase the NPC's understanding.

Using short comments, and socials, NPCs can then behave fairly appropriately in given situations.

[JilesDM]

Originally Posted by Sorry to wind the discussion back a bit but I wish to dispute the foreseable future point. It took 10 years to go from Wolfenstein (with stupid 'run towards you shooting' enemies) to Unreal Tournament - with enemies that used the same equipment, strategies, and stats as the players.

The Wolfenstein -> UT transition was entirely evolutionary--and quite simple at that. All of the science behind UT has been well understood since the advent of linear algebra. The only obstacle was the capability of the computer to pump out pixels quickly and still have enough cycles to spare for simplistic AI.

The transition from simplistic finite state AI to a program capable of passing the Turing test will require a revolutionary discovery. We do not yet even know how to begin to approach the problem. In other words, unlike realtime graphics rendering, believable AI is not simply a matter of having sufficient processor speed. There is a qualitative difference between sentience and raw computational capacity that we have yet to fully identify.

[JusticeJustinian]

We've already got an algorithm that's theoretically capable of passing the turing test. Neural Networks, afterall they're based on our own neurons.

Will it be able truely to pass the turing test? Not for quite some time.

The qualitative difference between sentience and computational power is the ability to learn.

-- Kwon J. Ekstrom

[Eagleon]

The thing I think we're missing in current AI is goals and barriers to those goals. Some sort of incentive in the bot's programming to do something, anything, other than respond when the other person types, combined with blocks that would require the AI to develop more than just a 1-2 approach to things. The ability to know whether something is a block or not is also essential. This would not only make it more efficient at attaining the goals assigned to it, it would also make it go through the side-topics that humans have to in order to really learn something. Humans can not only learn that 1+2=3, but also the rest of addition, and that 1+2=3 is the same process as 5+26=31, and that this is actually both signifigant and useful for doing other problems.

Assign the goal of language and knowledge, and the bot could eventually see that in order to learn how to speak, it has to pursue topics the person it is talking to mentions. Assign it avoiding being killed, and number of kills in a FPS, and a bot could learn to learn where the powerups are, when to use which guns, and maybe even some more advanced tactics.

[enigma@zebedee]

Originally Posted by The Wolfenstein -> UT transition was entirely evolutionary--and quite simple at that. All of the science behind UT has been well understood since the advent of linear algebra. The only obstacle was the capability of the computer to pump out pixels quickly and still have enough cycles to spare for simplistic AI. The transition from simplistic finite state AI to a program capable of passing the Turing test will require a revolutionary discovery. We do not yet even know how to begin to approach the problem. In other words, unlike realtime graphics rendering, believable AI is not simply a matter of having sufficient processor speed. There is a qualitative difference between sentience and raw computational capacity that we have yet to fully identify.

I was not discussing the graphics - which as you say while advanced are evolutionary. I was referring to the AI.

In wolfenstein you had bad guys that basically walked towards you and shot. That was pretty much it.

In UT you have bots that will work together as a team, wait in ambush, find and use different weapons, etc, etc.

Yes it's a controlled environment - but so long as you don't try and talk to them you cannot tell the difference between a bot player and a human player much of the time.

Obviously conversation is a harder goal to achieve - but people are making progress towards it.

I agree that a true AI (Machine Sentience) is a good way off yet. On the other hand convincing AI (Turing Test in set situations - for example a convincing peasant in a fantasy world) is not.

[Yazracor]

Originally Posted by (JusticeJustinian @ July 02 2003,23:24) We've already got an algorithm that's theoretically capable of passing the turing test.  Neural Networks, afterall they're based on our own neurons. Will it be able truely to pass the turing test?  Not for quite some time. The qualitative difference between sentience and computational power is the ability to learn. -- Kwon J. Ekstrom

To my knowledge I do not believe that what is currently termed "neuronal networks" has been proven to be theoretically able to pass the Turing Test - especially since a mathematical description of the Turing Test does not exist (if I am wrong here, ignore the rest of my post, please).

Also, neuronal network models, and even more so, neuronal networks used in production systems, are definitly not based on our own neurons. True, some ideas behind them might stem from a study of them, but they are so different in behaviour that "oversimplified" does not even come close to it. And even approximating the behaviour of even a single neuron more than just in a broad way is currently beyond the state of the art.

That the only difference between sentience and computational power is the ability to learn, I believe, is very, very wrong. There already are systems that can infere from facts and learn from mistakes - but is an expert or fuzzy logic system sentient?

What neuronal networks, expert systems and all other synthetic systems currently lack and what is an integral part of sentience, is reflection upon their own state, i.e. the ability to extract information about themselves. No neuronal network can tell you, e.g., what it "looks for" when it classifies images.

[shadowfyr]

Originally Posted by To my knowledge I do not believe that what is currently termed "neuronal networks" has been proven to be theoretically able to pass the Turing Test - especially since a mathematical description of the Turing Test does not exist (if I am wrong here, ignore the rest of my post, please).

Your not wrong. The main issues are a) how to connect different nets, b) how to make them do what they are supposed to and c) providing the proper level of complexity.

The first issue is simply that they don't have the capacity to adapt in the way a real brain can to sudden changes in inputs. You can build a network that can tell a flower from a car, but break apart some of the connections and try to attach a camera of the sort that are being used to help replace human vision and the network will self destruct and stop working. You have to start with the assumption that it will take that type of input and even then, get the wrong pins hooked up on the new 'eye' and it gets confused, because things are not where it expects them. This problem has been 100 times worse when you try to take one such netowrk and plug it into the inputs of the other. I assume that instead of taking the test output and feeding it to the test input they tried wiring them directly into each other, which may be a stupid mistake anyway.

The second issue is a major complication, because if you are not careful about what information you provide it, the network can make associations that are flat out wrong and miss what you where trying to teach it completely. One famous instance was one the military tried to teach how to see tanks hidden in forests. Somehow all the photos with tanks got taken on days that where overcast. The network learned to distinguish between overcast and sunny days and ignored the tanks completely. Oops!

The third issue is tied to some extent with the first. The original asumption when they started building these things was that the human brain was much more connected and homogenous in function. Since then both experimentation and studies of individuals with certain types of damage have shown that we don't have one single network, or even 50 specialized ones, but that even the specialized section dealing with the ability to see distance is broken up into subsections that distinguish real size, distance from viewer, relationship to other objects, orientation, etc. and even subsections that coordinate these thing depending on if we are consciously describing them, or merely attemting to pick it up. Break the ability to correctly identify size consciously using common illusions and your hand still knows the correct size and placement of the object, even if you insist that the object looks bigger than it is.

For neural nets to provide more than simple processesing will require lots of specialized networks, connected to other localized networks, connected to more general imformation organizing networks and then back the other way through more specific networks to produce the text, sound, etc. it uses to communicate what is going on. Without a significant change in the type of equipment used to build such and some way to integrate all the desperate pieces on the final build without the whole mess going literally insane, it won't even produce believable AI. And if you did manage it, the result would be as unique and unreproducable as a real person, requiring that you build the next one entirely from the ground up all over again.



As for the discussion of Chat-bot types and more focused and specific concepts. There was a project some time back, and probably still on going, called Cyc. At the time I read the article about it, they had managed to get it to a believable 4 year old level. It used a complex database that specifically included the capacity to make complex interconnections between ideas. When not busy learning it was searching through all the stuff it had been fed for the day and piecing together various likely connections and assigning them probabilities of being true based off its past knowledge. The key here is that it 'never' made the type of assumption that a chat bot does, which is that what it knows is infallable and always correct. This allowed it to be smart enough that it could likely learn that someone talking about the death of there uncle is not likely to see them again, but that the death of their friend to a huge troll the day before was temporary.

Such a system would however require its own dedicated server to run (the complex database searching would kill the muds server), you would need some sort of method to determine what sort of things should actually become common knowledge for the entire AI and what things should be specific to only the NPC that learned it (probably requiring an admin to review such, since such review is also needed to help it correct confirm any connections it makes between new words and ideas with things it knows) and finally, even in a limited environment like a mud, it is unlikely it will 'mature' significantly. It will also start out appearing to be quite stupid and have to get the feel of proper interaction over time. This last bit becomes an issue of course when the NPC is a shop owner and some player tells it, 'give me some bloody lights', but it doesn't yet know that a light and a torch can be equated.

In any case, such an AI could in time fool a lot of people, but requires a great deal of time and effort to correct its mistakes and misassociations. Something that 'may' be possible to do by giving repeated information more weight than something it hears only once, but could lead it into a AI form of gullibility and syntactical chaos be anyone that figured out that they where talking to an AI and decided to play a joke on it by feeding it false information. A problem that only grows worse if what it learns is explicit language or gets told that some player prefers to be called something that it isn't yet aware of as a cuss word or rude.

Though such an AI is very possible. The question is, does anyone want to take the time to teach it properly and when if ever do you decide it has learned enough of the general knowledge needed to let you freeze the more complex learning system it has and not have it fall flat on its face the first time it runs into something it is no longer able to intergrate. After all, it is not practical to let its knowledge base expand infinitely and even in a mud environment there is no certainty that it will even reach a point where its growth levels off enough that you won't need to worry about loging in and finding that it just added 500 new words and 1000 theories about how they interconnect. One would hope however that it would eventually level off. lol