New ideas for AI in games?

[Rodrigo Robles]

I participated in the last google aichallenge too. The last version of my bot uses learning to take their decisions. Unfortunately the results of my bot was modest. I read the post-mortem of the winners and found no one using learning, only specialized the algorithms for that requirement.
Learning is maybe the most interesting topic in AI, but in practice it can't beat an optimal algorithm...

[pstudio]

I participated in the last google aichallenge too. The last version of my bot uses learning to take their decisions. Unfortunately the results of my bot was modest. I read the post-mortem of the winners and found no one using learning, only specialized the algorithms for that requirement.
Learning is maybe the most interesting topic in AI, but in practice it can't beat an optimal algorithm...

Yeah, that's my experience as well. All these modern AI methods where the AI try to learn to play is pretty cool, but they'll rarely come near custom tailored AIs. Some of my teachers at the university runs the Mario AI Challenge which is focused on these more modern AI learning methods. However they failed to specify that in their first challenge so the winner was a relatively simple AI agent using A* to find the optimal path.

There's a reason why commercial games use custom AIs'. It works and is often more simply to implement than learning methods. I do believe that learning methods will gain a greater importance in commercial game AI, but it will only be as part of custom AIs and in optimising parameters. An AI based purely on learning is probably just to hard to do.