🚀 go-pugleaf

dmb@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (David Baggett) writes:

>Actually, rice-chex is just a general-purpose server.  If you want a
>challenge, try finding a breakfast cereal (with approprite hyphenation)
>that *doesn't* work when you say "ping <cereal>.ai.mit.edu"  :-)

"captain-crunch" should not count as "Cap'n Crunch".  Plus, pinging it
didn't leave the roof of my mouth all sore.

>That's very much an assumption, and one based on the current state of
>the art.  There are possibly ways of simulating generalized thought
>without using the conventional GA and NN methods.  I don't think the
>information overload is inherent in the problem, but rather a
>side-effect of the solution methods we currently have.

Well, of course.  But quantum advances -- things that are going to make
AI possible -- by definition can't be predicted.  I'm talking about
current methods: with the tools we have right now, the only way GAs or
NNs are going to be used in games on home computers is when home
computers get powerful enough to handle them.  Not any time soon.
This might not be the case when you finish your graduate work.  (Not to
put any pressure on you, Dave...  Heh.)

>That still sort of seems like "faking it" to me.  The character is
>still chosing from a predetermined set of choices.  It only becomes
>interesting, IMHO, when the algorithm (method) starts producing
>patterns of behavior that were not programmed in at the outset.  GA's,
>at least, provide a straightforward way to make this happen, though
>it's unclear (to me at least) that they have anything at all to do
>with independent thought.

Yep.  Faking it big-time.  But even that level of intelligence, even
faked, is much better than 95% of the games out there, which just
blindly throw a billion enemies at you hoping you ram into one.  And
if you break up various methods of attack into smaller "action atoms,"
the game could re-combine them into a mammoth number of different
stratagies.  Things the programmer never imagined.
	No, it's not intelligence by any meaning of the word, but it is
useful for "smarter" enemies.  Games aren't labs and they don't need to
be theoretically pure.  (Good thing, too, 'cause I'd never be allowed to
ever do another one...)
--
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 Greg "Maddog" Knauss               "Aieee!"              greg@duke.quotron.com
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