New ideas for AI in games?

[Ingemar]

AI has been previously a very popular topic and in certain occasions there was even a degree that you can obtain in institutions. However, it didn't live up to the expectations and later was renamed to "Intelligent Systems" and now is an area of science that has limited applications, being more like a meta-science itself.

I think the problem that the concept over-hypes itself already in the name. But I consider "AI" and "game AI" to be very different.

I wrote two whole chapters about game AI in "Tricks of the Mac Game Programming Gurus" in 1995, probably one of the longer texts about the subject at the time. But I didn't call it "game AI" because "AI" was such a hyped concept, I called it "behavior" and "environment". But it was about the usual stuff, basic behaviors (hunter, evader, patrol), path finding, FSMs, game state analysis...

Today I am teaching graphics and game programming, I have similar material in my textbooks, but now I call it "game AI" and I actually consider the concept a nice contrast to AI. Game AI is well known to be limited, so we don't expect wonders, which is a good thing.

My favorite game AI techniques are flocking and influence maps. They can really produce interesting and convincing behaviors. But do spice it up with some randomness.

[WILL]

I'd love to have a PGD Challenge that is all about AI.

The thing I love about the whole topic, in some ways Ingemar is right (it's a bit overhyped), you can hack at it and as long as you make it look like it's doing something intelligent, or behaving intelligent, then you have a pretty good game AI. It's something that can be easy to get into, but can be hard to master.

I think such a challenge would have your players go against and try to "beat" it OR create non-player AI character/bots, etc that have to work with the player in some way.

Designing the challenge rules might be as interesting as designing the games that go into the challenge it's self.

[User137]

Speaking of AI challenges, one just started on monday. Sadly it's hosted in finnish only. There's been many similar no-reward contests throughout the years, lots fun. They make up new game and rules, and let people use whatever programming language they want. You send source code only for the console application, and hoster makes binary of it on Linux test machine. Then they make them play against eachother and count points.

Currently up is: http://www.ohjelmointiputka.net/kilp...nnus=valtapeli
Not sure if google translates the page well, but i'll explain idea shortly. 16x16 board, where players fill 1 empty cell per turn. At the end all solid areas are calculated, and you get exponentially more points the bigger the area is. So 1 big connected area would give most. Other AI/player is only harassing, trying to disconnect the areas of other.

[wodzu]

I'd love to have a PGD Challenge that is all about AI.

How about something like this:

There is a defined arena and set of rules. We need to write a bot that will be fighting in that arena against other bots? AIs could be loaded to the main game via a DLLs. Of course someone would have to prepare the main application - The Arena.

[Ingemar]

How about something like this:

There is a defined arena and set of rules. We need to write a bot that will be fighting in that arena against other bots? AIs could be loaded to the main game via a DLLs. Of course someone would have to prepare the main application - The Arena.

The only problem with that approach is cross-platform issues. Could one make a cross-platform solution? The easiest way is to use scripts, but a PGD challenge should ne in Pascal. Pascal Script? (If I could only figure out how to use it.)

[pstudio]

I would probably go with a client server approach using TCP. The main game, the arena, will be the server and will wait for bots to connect as clients. This should allow for all the Pascal dialects to be used on all platforms. You could then add a template for TCP communication for the most popular languages (FPC, Delphi and Oxygene) to make it easier for developers to focus on the ai.

We talked a bit about this form of competition a while ago in the next PGD Challenge thread. Some of us were interested and some were not. Personally I find ai interesting and would be up for such a competition. If there is enough interest in it, I may try and create a simple ai game this summer which we can use for such a competition.

[User137]

If you want to be complicated, you can use TCP. But as i said before, you can make applications communicate with eachother in console. Readln(), Writeln() and maybe Flush() are all that are needed for the bots. I assume most pascal based languages can read and write to system console?

The game host application may need some process threading, or other fancy thing i haven't experimented with much. TProcess class on fpc?

And of course the consoles themselves can be hidden from the user, so the communication is invisible.

[Ingemar]

If you want to be complicated, you can use TCP. But as i said before, you can make applications communicate with eachother in console. Readln(), Writeln() and maybe Flush() are all that are needed for the bots. I assume most pascal based languages can read and write to system console?

The game host application may need some process threading, or other fancy thing i haven't experimented with much. TProcess class on fpc?

And of course the consoles themselves can be hidden from the user, so the communication is invisible.

Hm, so maybe bots could just be CLI Pascal programs communicating with the server over a pipe? That sounds farily doable. The server could have a nice 3D view (so it can be recorded to a movie), and it opens all bots using a list of file names, communicating with some predetermined commands.

Each bot probably should be limited in how many commands it can send per second, or at least what actions it can take. There should be some time from a command until you get a result (so if you ask the bot to "look" it takes some time until you "see" something).

Sounds fun.

[pstudio]

Well I don't know if I would call it complicated. It depends on what socket libraries are available. Personally I use Oxygene for Java so that is quite easy, but I haven't used FPC or Delphi in a long time, so I don't know what kind of support they have.
Yes it is possible to use readln and writeln. As I see it, it really depends on what sort of data you want to send and how good a socket library you have available. But I suppose it would be nice debug feature, if a bots console output could be shown during testing. In the end, it depends on who is making the game and what that person prefers. IMO that person would also have to provide a template for each pascal dialect, so that contestants don't have to write the functions for communication with the server, but they only have to focus on writing the ai. Ideally the would only need to implement one method:

procedure TBot.DoMove(FGame: TGameMetrics);
begin
...
SendCommand(...);
end;