Erdos wrote:
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Sounds more like generic future of computing, to me. When such technologies get developed, it'll probably be done by someone outside the MUD community as a generic keyboard-replacing tool, rather than by a MUD coder.
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Yeah, that seems likely.
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Artificial intelligence could be a big thing for MUDs eventually. Imagine if 20% of the playerbase consisted of AI, and it was so well done that the only way you could tell was that those players mysteriously refused to go to reunions or even talk on the phone.
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This is likely to go the same way (developed outside MUDs, used by MUDers), though the sort of Turing-capable AI you're talking about is not exactly around the corner. AI of that magnitude is also surely going to be frightfully expensive in terms of CPU cycles and memory, so even if we as a species do develop Turing AI, it's not going to run on your average mud server for a long time after it's first developed, much less run well enough to support whole populations of Turing AI-based NPCs.
Online Alchemy is one of the companies I'm aware of working in this space (), but they're not working to create "true" (Turing) AI, just a good enough simulation. They're also not really aiming at massively multiplayer platforms because of the server cost.
--matt
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