Ok Everyone, Ive been debating things within my Skull on wether to try to put an advance AI system within my Mud.

I know it would be great to have mobs that an interact with players, to even have it to a point where players and mobs are hard to tell apart.

Even have mobs hunt with other players as member of thier group.

Just a couple ideas.

But the reason for the post here is to get everyone elses opnions and ideas on what they would like to see in a mud AI wise.

So please anyone with an opinion on this let me know.

Thank you everyone in advance.

Torhan Sacras
--------------------------
Mud.elysiumsgate.com:6000

Good luck. There's not a single AI in existence that can fool people, and the best ones (which still don't even approach fooling people over any length of time) suck up a ton of processing power. Now try having thousands of them running in a free mud. Ain't gonna happen.
---matt

Actually ELIZA, which was written by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, did confuse some people, and today there are much better tools available (although admittedly they wouldn't fool most people for long).

However the real difficulty with AI is conversation - and that's something that could be cut back significantly within a mud.  Instead of trying to make the mob hold a logical conversation, you could make it respond in the same way as a player who isn't interested in chatting (brief replies, ignoring or insulting if it doesn't understand how to respond, etc).

Instead of conversation, the main focus of mud AI should be on acting appropriately, and that's something that's already been done many times before.

Like I said, can't fool anyone for any length of time.

And I've yet to see any mud by anyone where the NPCs act appropriately. For that matter, I've yet to see any game period where the NPCs act like they're anything but NPCs.

--matt

If they're trying to hold full conversations. However the objective here presumably isn't to make a mob which holds a human-level conversation, but instead to create a mob which acts like a human player. And unless you're playing a heavy RP-oriented mud, that's unlikely to require much in the way of conversational skills.

I have - except for the conversational skills. But in terms of playing ability, there have been numerous cases of bots which can play as well as most players. Back in 94/95 I even saw a mud which added such mobs into the mud - they showed up on the "who" list, gained levels, and grouped up with each other. The real problem was that (being on 24/7) they quickly overtook all the regular players.

The real trick for acting like a human isn't AI - it's AS. Artificial Stupidity. You need to dumb the computer down to a believable skill level. That's why when you play a computer game, the computer opponent doesn't tear you apart every game - it makes mistakes, doesn't respond as quickly as it should, etc.

Well the idea that i had was to make the Mob so it would do stupid things, like die. But also, i was going to make it so it would act like most players, short responses like said above.

I want to make it so the mobs have a higher interaction within the mud, instead of just being there.
That is my goal, I want to make it so mobs remember you, what you do, the mobs would have like a collective consious (spelling, been a long day =P). They would then offer to group with you, offer to help yo in some way.

Just a bunch of ideas i have, I have an idea in mind on how to get the processor power i will need, but its all just up in the air right now.

Torhan Sacras
----------------------
Mud.elsyiumsgate.com:6000

Are you looking at ALL mobs, or just some, I went a step further than special procedures, and set up NPC classes (my mud is classless - so maybe professions is a better word) and left it up to the builder to be realistic with what classes they assign to what mob (if any), as it would be stupid to have a bird of paradise mob trying to act like a blacksmith.

It took a lot of work, but since I had found that all the mobs get polled in some way or another anyway, it was worth it to get a bit more life in some of them, this can also give the appearence that they all do something at times even though many are doing nothing, the ones that do, give the whole area/room an appearence of purpose

So in other words, mobs can do very limited sets of activities in muds somewhat convincingly. Killing things is hardly the sum total of "playing" a mud.

Examples from our games: A mob isn't going to be able to intelligently go about acquiring a shop (can only be purchased from other players), intelligently stock that shop by acquiring items the way a player can, or search out players to sell that shop to for a profit.

A mob isn't going to be able to participate in politics at all as it lacks the ability to communicate at more than an extremely rudimentary and rote level.

A mob isn't going to be able to participate in the writing and art contests we have monthly.

A mob isn't going to be able to effectively participate in city raids the way a player can (ie independently cooperating with other players from its city).

Yes, if you define "playing" as "bashing monsters" then a mob can be somewhat convincing. Of course, without the ability to learn, how is the mob going to keep up with the latest player innovations in bashing? It can't, because that would require it to parse communications from player to player, and good luck managing that.

I mean, saying a mob can "play" a mud just as well except for communication is saying almost nothing. Communication is what muds are all about.

--matt

Well I can't speak for your mud, but most of us are trying to create games, not glorified talkers.  Within a gaming context, most things can be simulated - that includes single combat, large scale battles, questing and exploration, building, purchasing and running shops, gathering resources, manufacturing items, and so on.  Even from a conversational point of view, it is possible to create a mob that can pass simple scrutiny - and as I've said before, in most cases that is sufficient.

It all depends on how you design your mud and what your objectives are.  If you're trying to create a game in which every action is roleplayed out through emotes, then obviously it's going to be very difficult to create any sort of mob.  On the other hand, if you're trying to create a game which is heavily automated, then you should be able to create a fairly reasonable simulation of a player.  One possible scenario might be a race-wars game in which the two opposing races cannot understand each others language - in such a scenario you could make it extremely difficult to distinguish enemy mobs from enemy players.

Simply stating that it cannot work without even finding out what the original poster is trying to achieve is very shortsighted, and hardly the sort of response I'd expect from the lead designer of a successful mud.  Do you think you'd be where you are now if you'd listened to that sort of advice from other people when creating Achaea?

There are different types of success than the popularity of your mud, the length of time your MUD is up, and even, *gasp*, the amount of money you make in a month on it. If I made a MUD, or anything else for that matter, that has innovative ideas in it, whether or not those ideas work out, I would count my MUD a success. If you do that, you've made that much progress on improving the world, and that to me is the only thing that truly matters in life, improving things so that others after me can enjoy them. I enjoy what the people before me imagined, so why not do the same for others?

It doesn't matter if it's impossible, what matters is that he tries his best at making his mobs indistinguishable from people. Because he _will_ make progress, even if that progress is a bit of renewed interest in the field for a good coder, and if we keep trying, eventually, it'll be a simple thing to do. But only if. It sounds corny, but it's very true.

Don't compromise on making your mobs the way others think is possible, Torhan.

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 ;).

Assuming we avoid NLP and restrict ourselves to killing, questing, and exploring, there is no reason mobs cannot learn. Especially if you grant them a collective knowledge base (though that may not be a good idea, depending).

Perhaps some muds rely on communication, but unspoken aspects seem dominant on hack'n'slash-ish muds, in my experience. Similarly to when I play a first-person shooter, say Natural Selection, I don't lay down hours of discourse to breach a room... When we go in, we each know which way to point, where the shotgun should be, where the hmg should be, etc... In fact, commander's can (and routinely do, given one of our comms doesn't have a mike) rely almost entirely on waypoints (which show up on your hud) without mentioning a word.

Well, I'd apply the same to muds, at least in terms of grouping, killing, and so forth. Imagine a mud in which say, tell, ooc, etc were all disabled. If you grouped up and went xping, I imagine that the mobs would do perfectly well. You could use pointing to distinguish targets, and when attacking, hope that everyone can reason through where they should be... Clerics healing, tanks tanking, etc... There are more than a few players out there (in fact, dominant on some muds) that talk little to none, but take full advantage of the multiplayer aspect.

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.

No, mobs are not "****-poor" at communication - what they are poor at is conversations, and as I've already pointed out, those are not always necessary in order to make a mob appear human.

"Success" is a relative term, and depends entirely on what you're trying to achieve.

And I've already given examples of how it could be done.

I rely heavily upon Pulp Fiction philosophy, so according to Mr. Wolf

So appearantly there is not much need to make mobs "indistinguishable" from players, only to give the outward appearance of intelligence.  This is very manageable, almost basic on some levels.  From smarter mobs in combat, mobs with goals, mobs that remember and hold grudges,  they all are implented in various forms all over the place.  My suggestion to you Torhan would be to check out some of the different muds that implent these kinds of things (usually they are very eager to promote these features, so finding which games to visit should be somewhat easy) and find out what you like/dislike, make your improvements and get the ball rolling.
As far a conversation goes, even the great scripts like the and similar bots were not able to hold up under close inspection.  Even if there were the capabilities to create indistinguishable bots, conversation included, I'm not so sure that I would want it. What I am getting out of conversation with mobs is a decent Q&A that draws from a knowledge bank.  Talking to a farmer about the weather, how it affects his crops.  A shopkeeper may know about any recent violence in the area or any known thieves.  Do the conversations need to hold up to human-to-human level?  I  try to keep them as seperate beasts, talk to mobs to get tidbits of info, talk to humans because thats where the strong relationships will be formed.

Yes, this can be done somewhat well (I've still yet to actually see it done where it would fool me for any length of time though. You guys are all imagining that human players only ever act with the goal of bashing monsters in mind. Even while bashing monsters, players exhibit tell-tale quirks that I just have never seen mobs in any sort of game exhibit.)

My biggest problem with this discussion generally is the idea that muds are fundamentally about bashing monsters. I also take issue with the "Follow your dream no matter how possible it is." ethos that at least one poster evidenced. Dreams are wonderful, but they should come with a reality check or you're bound to be forever disappointed. I advised him against his pursuit because it's more likely he'll become the UN Secretary General than create mobs that can play a mud indistinguishably from a human.

--matt

You're the only one who has stated that, as part of your straw man argument. The rest of us have been discussing creating mobs which simulate the gaming aspects of muds, which in many cases is the primary focus of the mud, and of which combat is only one such aspect.

A few years ago, I logged on to a mud using an unknown name, and played around for a while. After a while I ended up in a conversation with the immortals of that mud, and mentioned that I was planning to create a mud of my own one day. I told them about some of the features I was planning to add, and the head coder laughed - he told me that the features I wanted were impossible. I never did tell him that I had already created my mud - and that the features I described were already implemented.

Aim too high, and you can always lower your goals if it gets too hard. Aim too low, and you'll never pull yourself above the level of most other muds.

I have played many computer games "where players and mobs are hard to tell apart" (quote taken from the original poster). To the best of my knowledge, none of the developers of those games have gone on to become the UN Secretary General.

At least you recognize that monster bashing is not the end-all, be-all of muds. As far as the gaming aspects go, how would the political game be simulated by mobs?

Yes, that's a wonderful story, but it doesn't mean much. 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.

Well this I certainly agree with. Of course, the level of most muds is so low to begin with it's hard not to overcome that level given any reasonable level of effort by any reasonably competent person.

I'm still waiting to hear about these games so that I can go check them out and discover that I have no problem at all telling the NPCs and players apart. If they allow any free-form written communication or any sort of creative self-expression (in other words, if they allow any communication whatsoever), they will be easy to tell apart. And, considering that all action is communication, well, good luck. Perhaps if a game only had one single action that someone could perform, and those actions could only be performed in set intervals of time, and must be performed in those intervals (giving no control over the player character, in which case the player character is an NPC anyway), I could see it.

--matt

The mobs could analyze the influence statistics of various pursuits and 'players' in the game. Perhaps they could be assigned personalities on top of their normal AI so that they would have a predisposition to 'oppulent spending to impress' or if they're the evil type 'public whipping to frighten'. They could form alliances and coalitions in order to influence the various councils, giving votes to their friends and weighing decisions based on their own goals and the goals of their friends and foes. They maneuver for a piece of the pie of whatever alliance they are a part of by buddying up with the powerful, and perhaps hiring assassins to take care of those that are not in agreement with their policies. Assigning statistics for goals, influence, alliances would make this all quite possible.

I think this would be a very interesting system with or without humans =).

And the first time a human asks the NPC what his stance is on issue X, and starts questioning him in detail, the NPC will look like exactly what it is: A piece of relatively dumb code attempting, futiley, to look intelligent.

--matt

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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!"?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.