[Yui Unifex]

Yeah, whenever I questioned my Economic Advisor in the original Civilization why his policies were necessary, he always said the same stupid thing over and over again. And then the Military Advisor would pipe up 'I concur', the bastard. I'm glad that nobody had any fun with such an unrealistic game.

That's ridiculous. I didn't have to spend time grilling my friends on their frickin' policies when we were playing a hotseat game of Civ. You have a bizarre stigma when it comes to multiplayer games. The fun is what matters; nothing else. If you think this sort of communication is an absolute requirement for fun, you're missing out on a great wealth of opportunities.

Now when the AI in a game outsmarts me, or figures out my pattern and I must rise to the challenge, THAT'S what I think is fun -- not silly IC discussion.

[the_logos]

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

[Yui Unifex]

Exactly! Since we understand that the fun is what matters, there are several games that do a very good job of emulating human behavior with their AI at the game, or what I like to call the 'fun', level. Galactic Civilizations has a great system for a 4X: The AI plays the same game you do, only at lower levels they make more 'mistakes'. I've been fooled by quite a few Quake bots when I was still into FPS, and the marine AI in Half-Life was incredible when released. There are a thousand net-games that pad the human players with computer players, and many times you don't know which is which. Is that a computer player named 'sandy' or just another bored housewife? ####, we always joked that the characters in our Dungeon Siege games played better when we weren't controlling them, and a number of times we'd start playing only to find that one party had gone to sleep while the other continues on, clueless.

So what lengths does an AI have to go to fool you where it really matters, in the game? It's probably trivial to write an AI to beat you in certain types of games, especially given the in-depth game knowledge that someone familiar with his system understands. To truly achieve human-like behavior this 'perfect' model can then be dumbed down with mistakes and slow-responses according to the level of the AI. Maybe the system will "miss" an action and continue doing something detrimental, or it will play favorites with an action that does not necessarily have the intended effect.

In the end, we don't know what will fool you. We'll probably have to do a double-blind where you play with a human and then an AI, and then decide which is which. There's not much of an argument without a concrete system, because we can always make up rules that would counteract each-other's efforts. What do you suggest as an objective standard for measuring an AI that can fool players within a game?

[the_logos]

At the fun level, sure. At the fooling me level in a mud, no. (Remember, we're talking about muds here, not chess, for instance.) At PARTS of a mud, I believe an NPC could fool me for a bit, but that's only if you explicitly exclude speech or any sort of relatively parseable by a human and free-form communication generally.

Even at bashing, a mob needs to be able to use free-form communication to appear human. There's too much organization that's achieved by verbal communication. Yes, you can order mobs or speak in reasonably pre-defined ways to get a mob to cooprate, but then you're not fooling anyone obviously.

If you said to me, "What do you suggest as the objective standard for measuring an AI that can fool players within a mud?" (I mis-interpreted the original poster's intent as being to create a mud that could achieve a state in which players and NPCs cannot be told apart.) then I'd reply that the objective test needed is actually the same as the yet-to-be-achieved gold standard in A.I.: An NPC that you can converse with as you might another human. This is the standard for me for the mis-interpreted question because talking to other people is fundamental to a mud. Indeed, I've never seen a text mud that did not allow for free-form written communication in some manner. (There IS a graphical mud for kids that only allows pre-scripted phrases. Even there though one could construct a meta-language based on frequency of the pre-scripted phrases you use and the timing between them that would be free-form communication and thus unattainable by an NPC currently.)

What you said to me was, "What do you suggest as an objective standard for measuring an AI that can fool players within a game." My answer is that you'd have to specify the game.

In a game with heavily restricted options and no free-form communication commonly used by humans (ie my above meta-language example is pretty extreme. If a player was speaking meaningless gibberish in the meta-language, I wouldn't suspect him of being an A.I. simply because I wouldn't expect almost anyone to be using a meta-language in that circumstance.), it's already been achieved. I can't tell the difference between a human and an A.I. in checkers or chess, for instance.

The main reason I objected is because I object to looking at virtual worlds as mere games. They're not. They're much more than games as probably everybody who likes muds enough to read this forum understands at a gut and possibly intellectual level. And it's their much moreness that precludes a mob AI from fooling anyone for very long.

(And again, I'm not saying that this fact precludes them from being good at games or from being fun to interact with.)

I'd say this thread is about dead from my angle. We're arguing about a comment I made resulting from a post I misinterpreted in the first place.
--matt

[KaVir]

The same way as you'd simulate any other political computer game. It's only the communication part which is the problem, and that's not part of the game mechanics.

Except that creating muds in which "players and mobs are hard to tell apart" is not unattainable, nor is it even remotely comparible with trying to fly to another galaxy.

There are plenty of them. Try the bots on many first-person shooters, or look at the tactics used by the computer in many RTS games, or the AI used in many other games - these represent the gaming aspects, the parts I've said repeatedly can be simulated to a reasonable degree. Sometimes the computer makes a mistake, but that is usually due to poor collision detection or line of sight, neither of which are an issue in most muds. But overall, it is indeed hard to tell the players and mobs apart.

[the_logos]

Huh, I don't know what political system you're playing with then. In our games, certainly, there's no way to play the political game without communication. Same with Dark Ages, and our games and Dark Ages are often used as examples of the best politics in mud-dom.

Think of it this way: Until an AI can play the board game Diplomacy effectively, it cannot play a political game effectively and it certainly can't do so in a way as to fool anyone into thinking an NPC is a player.


I wonde if you actually read other people's posts sometimes. Go back to my last post. We're talking about muds, not chess, not half-life, etc. Communication is a core part of playing a mud. I'm sorry if you have difficulty with that concept, but I'm done trying to explain it to you.

--matt

[Tavish]

I think I've missed something in the explantion of muds then as well.  Would you be kind enough to indulge me on how games such as half-life/quake (of the online variety of course) are not considered muds?  These games place multiple users within an enviornment where they interact with one another.  Is verbal exchange the determining characteristic of a mud, meaning AOL messenger or irc would be considered a mud above a pk game where the height of communication is "You just got pawned!"?

[Spazmatic]

You make a lot of assumptions about the mud, and what players want... On some of the GW's I've played, for example... Communication consisted of "<CHAT> Blah: could i get a bless?" and "<CHAT> OMG FAGGOT". Bots that did that, out pked me, and knew how to use their classes would probably fool me for a good while until I got so ****ed I'd start throwing random insults at it.. Then I'd probably imagine I was getting the silent treatment.

I also know mudders who GO ABOUT SAYING ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Not one peep. Some of them have trouble forming sentences that make sense in English, for example. Would simulating them be reasonable?

You're caught up on the NLP problem. AI != NLP. You can fool very successfully without NLP. True, it won't pass the Turing Test, but we're restricting ourselves to a game environment, not the whole freakin' world.

First, you make a lot of assumptions about the "political game". Bots can't get by on, say, Galatic Emperor, however, I can imagine a clever bot pulling off a political coup d'etat on Xyllomer, where candidates are often rarely seen in first person by the majority of voters, or can bully their votes in the worst case. Imagine any game element without heavy reliance on discourse understanding (which is difficult). It can be done. Period.

[the_logos]

Nice red herring. I'll bite anyway. I'm not willing to express an end-all be-all definition of what is and isn't a mud. I consider some degree of persistence to be necessary, but then, one could say that Warcraft III has some persistence because your wins and losses are persistent.

I'll just say that I don't quite consider Half-life or Warcraft-style games to be muds, and I don't think I'm alone in that opinion. Still, I'm hardly going to be dogmatic about it. If you want to call them muds I'm not going to spend much effort, if any, objecting. If you want to include those as muds then I don't have too much of a problem saying you could create an AI capable of fooling someone for awhile. Still, over time, people adapt new strategies and it's unlikely we're going to see mobs picking up on those new player strategies by themselves any time soon.

--matt

[KaVir]

I've been wondering the same about you for a while.

Go back and read my posts. You stated that "the entire point of a mud is the multiplayer aspect, which relies on communication". I replied with "No, the multiplayer aspect relies on social interaction - there are numerous examples of successful multiplayer games which have very little actual direct communication between the players".

You asked for examples of such games, and Half-life can be such (when played in multiplayer mode). Some of the bots available for half-life can be "hard to tell apart" from players, except for the rare cases where they get stuck due to poor collision detection. But were you to create a mud based around a similar theme, that would not be an issue. Within such a mud, you could indeed have mobs which were hard to tell apart from players. I already gave a similar example scenario, but you seem to have ignored it - either way, you need to stop trying to force your view of "what a mud is" onto everyone else. 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.

[Spazmatic]

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]

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]

[enigma@zebedee]

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]

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]

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]

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.