[MUD-Dev] FEAR Animat style AI for Quake 2

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Ted L. Chen" <tedlchen at yahoo.com>

> But, in terms of believable AI, unless you have a really good
> decision-system in place, it's not going to give you much
> "simplicity" or "realism".  The hard work is in defining the
> decision space.  At a simple level, the stimuli-response of
> 'animat' can easily be tricked, and actually produce funny results
> because they have no overriding executive.

> For example, assume we have a threat detection organ that tells
> the rest of the brain that someone is attacking when they have a
> rifle pointed towards us.  What happens when the guy with the
> rifle turns rapidly toward and away from us?

This is the kind of problem that neural networks and genetic
algorithms are good at, after the guy with the rifle turns and runs
away a few times, the system will come to associate that with "5
seconds from now that guy will be standing behind that barricade
shooting at me," or whatever tactic is being excercised that would
trick simpler AI, and have a grenade already primed when the player
gets there.  How good they can get at it is mostly a matter of how
much processing power you can dedicate to GA selection or NN
back-propagation, and how many inputs you can wire up and process in
real time.  Some of the dedicated Quake-bots based on these systems
have gotten very good indeed.

We're not far from being able to run this grade of AI for entire
worlds simulataneously (several thousand players interacting with a
like number of AI agents at any one time).  Maybe 5 years before we
see a game using this approach.

--Dave


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