|
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
|