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Game designers test the limits of AI

June 17th, 2007 by tim finin

An article by Scott Kirsner in the Boston Globe, Game designers test the limits of artificial intelligence, talks about research aimed at improving massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

“A lot of the most interesting work in artificial intelligence is being done by game developers,” says Bruce Blumberg, senior scientist at Blue Fang Games in Waltham, and formerly a professor at MIT’s Media Lab. “You have really bright kids who are dealing with problems they don’t realize are insoluble. They’re very motivated.”

In MMOGs, most of the characters are intelligent because that are controlled by people, so the behavior of computer controlled characters compare badly. Another challenge of MMOGs is that the human-controlled characters interact largely through conversations in natural language.

“You can’t talk to characters and expect a response that feels real,” Davis says. “So there are no games that are like detective stories, or romances, which are popular genres in the movies, because you can’t interview suspects or talk to other people.” … One way to get there is by having humans “train” the AI software. That’s the approach that game designer Jeff Orkin, now a grad student at the Media Lab, is taking. With a project called The Restaurant Game, Orkin invites players to assume the role of a restaurant’s wait staff. His plan is to capture their behavior and dialogue, and use it to build more realistic software-driven characters, in the same way that designers sometimes use motion capture cameras to record and replicate human movement.

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