My Dream AI Opponent

[BeeSting]

I know many of you are by now sick of hearing me *itching about the AI, which is by any level "intelligent”. I don’t know if it is due to technical limitation or what have you, but the thing never learn. And maybe this is where the problem lies it just isn’t aware of what it does because much of awareness involves the ability to lean from ones own mistakes, or to see the future through past concepts. But you could school the AI by programming, teaching it to react and formulate its path to achieve goals. Yet these become patterns of behavior for a human player to easily remember and react accordingly, and permitting he/she is creative enough, trappings could be set along the possible route that the AI will take. What then? Could we ever have a worthy artificial opponent? Could it ever learn after so many failures and formulate its paths accordingly in systematic manner? Could it ever be cautious and not fool hearty?

I would like to one day not have to micro manage each units but have reliable AI generals in charge of other parts of the army, in style according to their personalities…. and these may be real historical figures. Perhaps you could actually sit with them before battle in a camp and interact with them for a battle plan. Damn, this would totally suck me into the game and I would literally forget that I now live in the 21st century.

Got a little deep there…. My apologies for any headaches caused by reading this.

What would you like to see the AI do in general, or in specific?
Any comments on the present AI and possible fixes for the future?

Any comments from programmers or just dreamers like myself would be much appreciated.

I just thought it would be interesting to hear your opinions and thoughts on this.

[Colovion]

I remember a long time ago (years) I saw this game on the back of a comic book. I forget the name, but it was something to the effect of Robot Wars with large machines fighting. The biggest thing they were selling was their AI. Their comments were something along the lines "Computer Opponents learn from mistakes, and counter your usual fighting styles for more gameplay fun!" That game I never played it, but felt the idea a grand concept. Another year or so past, games like Starcraft were played and I saw another game in a Gaming mag which was an RTS game similar in style to Command and Conquer. It said basically the same thing about it's AI: "Computer AI searches your defenses for weak spots and exploits them. Stay on your toes!" That game, I also didn't play.

The point is that what I've always been impressed with was a computer opponent that could continually give me new challenges to overcome and new ways to try to defeat me which I'd have to, in turn, counter myself.

My thought of a truly remarkable AI is one which can see what you do poorly and exploit those weaknesses. If you start doing something well - such as building loads of archers to mow down their phalanxes then perhaps the next time they'll bring a bunch of light Cav to run down your pesky archers. Even something as simple as that would make my day, and anything more would floor me.

[A.Saturnus]

The problem is that all computer games use rule-based AI. The AI has a number of rules which it applies to any situation. Even those that exploit weaknesses of the player do that. They just have rules concerning possible weaknesses and when they see those they apply these rules. I suspect learning is implemented into rule-based AI by analysing the behaviour of the player and categorizing it according to preprogrammed rules. So the AI doesn´t really learn, it just has a set of different assumptions about the behaviour of the player and uses those assumption that have been correct most of the time before.

A revolutionary strategy game could make use of a connectionist network instead of rule-based AI. A mulit-layer perceptron, for example. The programmers could expose the network to strategic problems and let it assign "winning actions" (chosen by experts) to these until its performance is very high. It can then learn which actions are "winning" in which situation and generalize it to all strategic problems. The network would still not learn "on-line", - that is during playing with the player - but it would have a high chance of picking right moves in all situations not too different from those trained. The advantage would be that the network would not stick to rules that might be extremely off in some situations and would show a less monotone playing style.
Though the demands on the network for a game like RTW might be much too high.

[L`zard]

The funny thing about all this is that if the 'AI' where truely heuristic, everyone would be complaining about the cpu hit on thier top-o-the-line brand new 'puters,

tanstafl........

I wouldn't expect this until the entire gaming world has next generation boxes to play on, eh?

Pity......

[hung41584]

okay, you guys don't know how hard it is to create an ai. if you could produce one of those kind, the game could be like civ 2 and still would be a best-seller today. Have you guys ever looked at the scripts for an ai?? I remember a while back for aoe, all the ai had for a script was build buildings, build a few units, build bigger buildings, build more units, build more units, then build a wonder. I'm not so sure how they have evolved from that nowadays, but i would hardly think it would change from some sort of script form. You still get the same old "build this unit then that unit", if human builds this unit, build counter unit to that". And that's all that happens. If you hadn't already noticed, on normal difficulty, the ai just build regular units with no resource bonus, which means they can run out of money. But on harder settings, they get like 200% or greater bonuses and build gigantic armies out of a couple of cities. So this so "better ai" that you guys wanted doesn't exist, it seems the only improvement that can be presently made is a resource bonus. I'ved noticed this in many other games like civilization too.

[L`zard]

okay, you guys don't know how hard it is to create an ai. if you could produce one of those kind, the game could be like civ 2 and still would be a best-seller today. Have you guys ever looked at the scripts for an ai?? I remember a while back for aoe, all the ai had for a script was build buildings, build a few units, build bigger buildings, build more units, build more units, then build a wonder. I'm not so sure how they have evolved from that nowadays, but i would hardly think it would change from some sort of script form. You still get the same old "build this unit then that unit", if human builds this unit, build counter unit to that". And that's all that happens. If you hadn't already noticed, on normal difficulty, the ai just build regular units with no resource bonus, which means they can run out of money. But on harder settings, they get like 200% or greater bonuses and build gigantic armies out of a couple of cities. So this so "better ai" that you guys wanted doesn't exist, it seems the only improvement that can be presently made is a resource bonus. I'ved noticed this in many other games like civilization too.

hung: That's the point that A.Sat and I were trying to make, eh? The resources required for a heuristic 'AI' would be extremely large, and would either slow your puter to a crawl or lock you up entirely depending on your personal 'puters specs.

As far as any of the Total War series goes, we're not talking about A(rtificial)
I(ntelligence), we're talking about 'Programed Opponent'.

This is most likely true for about all of the games any of us is likely to see/play.

When 'big blue' goes back to winning, then we'll see, eh?

[Pode]

Umm, hate to burst your bubble, fans of the rule based AI, but a nerual network is capable of farily complicated tasks on relatively low end machines. A guy I work with has a couple of PC-104 single board computers, like 166Mhz processors, forming an adaptive autopilot that continually relearns how to fly an unstable helicopter 20 times a second. I *think* my 1.6 Ghz gaming machine, with 10 times the power, should be able to learn the ideas of rock paper scissors and flanking manuevers over the course of a few hours. It's not the machines that are lacking in knowhow and brainpower, it's the developers. I'm not saying they're dumb. I'm saying that they're not given enough time/funding/support to go learn about adaptive autopilot programming on the off chance that they could apply it to AI design. Corporate types aren't willing to gamble like that. The limitation is human, not machine