Jul 13, 2008
A subscriber of Think Artificial wrote to ask me about games and AI. In short, DF asked what my thougths are on AI in games and which ones I think are the most intelligent.
To answer this bluntly: Game AI is very different from it’s non-game counterpart, and it’s not my field of study. I’ve only compared modern games through a window. However, Alex of AIGameDev has superb coverage of AI in games and the top AI games of 2007, by community vote. The top of the line are Half-Life-2.ep.2 and BioShock.
But regarding Game AI in general: modern games are horribly void of intelligence. It depends on where you set the bar, certainly. There’s tons of AI in modern games compared to 5 years ago. But the first thing to note is that Game AI is not the same as AI. It’s a subset of it. Just like discrete mathematics are a subset of mathematics. And moreover, Game AI is a very specialized subset—it has well defined goals, models for construction and limitations.
May 12, 2008
Powerset went live today with the fruit of several months of research on natural language processing and semantics. They’ve been highly anticipated and the ride to this day has been up and down. I joined their private beta late last year and at the time there were many things unperfected; the whole venture suffering for it at the hands of critics. And high expectations are often the case when products pack more intelligence.
But it certainly looks like they’ve made significant advances judging from some test queries.
May 11, 2008
A few weeks ago the book Intelligent Complex Adaptive Systems (ICAS) was published.
Chapter V, titled Emergence of Creativity: A Simulation Approach, presents my latest research on the emergence of creativity in natural and artificial organisms, a theory of its origins and potential grounds for future artificial implementations. The book is distributed internationally.
Apr 1, 2008
Since early December 2007, a new author has been publishing articles on Think Artificial under my name. This author is not human, but intelligent software created by myself to relieve the pressure of regular posting. Currently, the system has posted over 20 articles without breaking cover.
Taking its cues from Google News Alerts on “robotics”, the system analyzes news articles — identifying and extracting relevant lines of text and generating a shorter version of the article. The text is then paraphrased using preset tunings to mimic my writing style. The ultimate result is an article that only needs my one-click administrator approval to be published.
Mar 19, 2008
Boston Dynamics released a new video of BigDog the other day. The improvements since last year’s demo are absolutely incredible. BigDog can now maneuver up and down rugged hills, balance on ice and jump. I’m not an avid fan of exclamation marks, but wow! In my honest opinion this quadruped is the most life-like robot made to date. Must-see video after the jump.
Mar 7, 2008
Snake robots are always incredible to watch, and CMUs modular snake robots are no exception. They are incredibly versatile - being able to crawl, climb, swim and scale flights of stars. The video shows all — and I was really impressed when it crawled up and down the leg of one of its creator … fast!
Jan 18, 2008
Recent news tell of software that analyzed over 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in 6 different situations. It could consequently discern whether the a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario. This isn’t the first time we’ve tried something like this, but previous devices haven’t been very successful (have you seen any talking dogs around?).
Nov 28, 2007
As much as I’d love a brain-computer interface for controlling game characters or avatars in virtual worlds, there are still a few years until they’ll be able to analyze our body’s every move and translate them in real time to machines. In the meantime, there are other options. Small and cheap sensors have promise for new machine interfaces that monitor your entire body.
Nov 19, 2007
One of my courses this semester is Programming Languages, covering their fundamental histories and differences. Something I direly need to open my eyes and jolt me out of Java fanaticism. I particularly enjoyed playing around with Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. Rather than selfishly leaving the precious resources somewhere in a dark corner, I wrote this article to help get you started with Lisp as well.
Nov 13, 2007
If you surf the web to any extent, you’ve inevitably noticed how the bottomless pit that is human stupidity presents itself there. Well, let’s remedy that with a bit of artificial intelligence. The StupidFilter is an absolutely brilliant project that aims to create an open-source filtering mechanism for stupid comments online.
