Yup. Pitfall. First step, Atari games, next step, the enslavement of humanity. Or our eradication. Whichever our robot overlords feel up to once they assume control.

This clip shows off the university's Object-Oriented Markov Decision Processes, which is a fancy way of saying the AI tries, tries then tries again until it knows how to do something. And while the clip is jarring, it's worth watching to the end. Where the robot gets to the end, and does a happy dance.

Machine Plays Pitfall, Dances [GameSetWatch]

Anyone who's played through a game like Microsoft's Fable II (who can forget your virtual dog?), BioWare's Mass Effect (with its robust roster of non-playable characters) or seen Sony's upcoming Heavy Rain (whose developer, Quantic Dream, promises a new type of relationship between player and character) may have wondered to themselves whether gaming, which is still in its infancy as an art form, is heading towards its inevitable Citizen Kane threshold. More than the graphics or surround sound, the latest game consoles' processing power are bringing to life AI-controlled characters unlike anything experienced before.

But what are these sentient beings that help or hinder gamers as they explore vast virtual worlds? Are the Locust Horde who hide behind blockades and orchestrate flanking attacks in Gears of War 2 the first step in some type of real-world AI nightmare like the apocalyptic future displayed in Warner Bros. Pictures' Terminator: Salvation? Will Steven Spielberg's next original game for Electronic Arts, which remains untitled, deliver on its promise of making a gamer connect with a female avatar emotionally?

Rather than go to the usual suspects of talented videogame developers, Kotaku set out to ask experts in the fields of Hollywood movie magic, theme park creators, robotics experts and AI specialists to answer the question: Do the AI-controlled characters in games qualify as robots or some other form of artificial life. Are those creatures who are at the player's mercy in Lionhead Studio's Black & White games truly virtual beings?

Akhil Madhani, technical staff director, Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development said that the term "robot" is used to describe a physical system, usually with the ability to respond to a changing or unstructured environment.

"As such, I don't think that most people would consider a videogame/virtual character to be a robot," said Madhani. "Nonetheless, algorithms used to program the behavior of a virtual character (not knowing the algorithms used in this case) may have application for a (physically embodied) robot."

Futurist Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute, has a much more sci-fi vision of gaming and the future.

"In short, our games have indeed evolved into crude life forms," said Frey. "Innovations in the digital world are happening exponentially faster than in the material world, so the digital beings in games will soon become far more lifelike, and will eventually step out of the screens and exist as 3D avatars, interacting with us, much like other people."

Frey believes the not-so-distant future will be inhabited by 3D avatars that will act like digital clones, sitting in for us at meetings and other types of gatherings, and learning from each interaction.

Others have a more realistic vision of the games of tomorrow.

Chris Darken, conference chair for Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment and an associate professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School, said that while game AIs have become more and more lifelike as a general trend and game characters are getting more information about their environment, and are processing it in more realistic ways; game AI is about creating a user experience, and game programmers are right to use whatever shortcuts and engineering tricks they can muster to produce the best possible experience given the budget of their project.

"Most game related AI today falls into the field of expert systems," explained Michael Schmidt, a Ph.D. student at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab. "In other words, they attempt to mimic and reproduce certain behaviors that we might expect a human to do; like path planning, avoiding obstacles, reacting to the user, etc."

"This is indeed very similar to some research that is going on in robotics," added Schmidt. "However, new research is beginning on to how robotics and AI systems can learn and understand their self and environment on their own, such that their behavior is self-emergent. Ultimately, we will have robotic and AI systems that won't need to be reprogrammed and redesigned for every task, but instead emerge naturally on their own".

Over the past four decades, videogames have evolved from the black-and-white graphics of Pong and Asteroids to lush 3D worlds that are actually now playable in full 3D thanks to new stereoscopic technology. Game AI has progressed from Super Mario Bros.' Goombas to Sega's Seaman to the aforementioned "best friend" in Fable.

"AI in games has come a long way, from simple look-up tables, to scripted interactions, and even some machine learning," said Schmidt. "However, it has only begun to scratch the surface of artificial life. The artificial life field is concerned with understanding and reproducing several essential functions in biology, such as evolutionary pressures and dynamics and self-reproduction."

Schmidt believes future videogame AI will likely move from expert systems, such as scripted behavior, toward more and more evolved and self-emergent behavior.

"Ultimately, everything from an AI creature's morphology and appearance to its behavior and interaction with the user could arise naturally from the environment and simulator itself," said Schmidt.

Like videogames, Hollywood technology is evolving at a record pace. Bret Nelson, producer, Jim Henson's Creature Shop, said that if you need an operator, it's not a robot. If it can perform its functions without intervention, it could be called a robot depending on what those functions are.

"I'd say that the game character is a robot if it would normally (or historically) be dependent on player input to perform its functions," said Bret Nelson, producer, Jim Henson's Creature Shop. "In that case, the AI would be serving a robotic function."

"I have to believe that the future of the game industry belongs to game makers whose characters delight their audience by displaying realism and intelligence in new and unexpected ways," said Darken.

At the end of the day, it's still the gameplay that matters. But improved AI does offer more challenges to gamers and helps immerse the player more fully in these worlds.

They'll now boast peripheral vision, meaning if they catch you out of the corner of their eye, they won't instantly start firing. Because, having only seen you out the corner of their eye, they're not really sure what they saw. So they'll either turn around and look a little harder or pop on over and investigate.

They'll also be more aware, and will make better use of their surrounds. If they see you, then lose you, they'll head to where they saw you last and start searching from there. And if they see you climbing a ledge or jumping over something, they'll do the same thing, meaning combat is going to be a lot more "3D" than the first game.

All well and good, but what we really want to know is: are we shooting at humans this time? Last time we checked (and be assured, we check often), a shirtless Mexican didn't take 17 bullets to the chest to kill. Fix that and all this extra stuff will just be icing on the cake.

Uncharted 2 is smarter than you [CVG]

In piece written for Edge magazine, Valve's Gabe Newell spoke about how Left 4 Dead's AI Director analyses a player's actions to gauge how well they are faring and adjusts the game to suit. The kind of user input data that can be captured from a mouse or gamepad doesn't give the level of detail that Newell would like to see, though, so Valve are researching ways of using biometrics and even EEG's to examine a gamer's inner state.

"There are new technologies where we can wire players up with EEGs and actually have direct exposure to their physical reactions to the games," writes Newell.

"We can know for sure of something is actually frightening the player - their heart rate is going up, their respiration stats are peaking, appropriate parts of their brains are being activated. Direct measurement of players’ arousal states and responses to the things we’re doing is super exciting. It just will allow us to be much more analytical about the decisions that we’re making and the roller coaster ride we’re trying to create for the player."

What kind of kit this will require you to buy remains a mystery, of course. I can just about stomach having a fake drum kit in my living room - having a brain scanner lurking next to the sofa might be a gadget too far.

Gabe Newell Writes for Edge [Edge]

AI startup Artificial Technology reckons it has a way to inject a little life into the dead-eyed puppets that populate most games. EKI One is AI middleware that Artificial Technology claim can give characters 'Intelligent and emotional behaviour' to enhance the game experience.

Quite how this is achieved is unclear (and probably NDA'd to the hilt) but the company say that gamers will "experience the story together with the characters and share the emotions of joy, anger, desire, rage and sorrow."

Sounds great, no? If you want to see the tech in action, you shouldn't have long to wait. German developer Twintime has licensed EKI One for its upcoming mystery game Odessa Twins.

Artificial Technology unveils EKI One [Develop]

Look at the big picture. Think 10 or 20 years down the road.

In that kind of time frame, do you think your games might have lots of different types of AI-controlled characters with different shapes, sizes, and movement capabilities?

Will players have AI henchmen that they expect to be just as intelligent as themselves?

Will your game worlds be significantly larger, more complex, and more dynamic than they are today?

Will you have huge crowds of AI characters — so many that just using simple steering and obstacle avoidance are no longer adequate to make them coordinate with each other effectively?

Will your games have realistic physics and huge amounts of physically-simulated objects, and will players be able to use the physics to mess with the AI characters in every way imaginable?

Will players be able to change the game world until it's virtually unrecognizable?

Will there be AIs in multiplayer that are expected to pass for human players?

If you're interested in nitty-gritty game design elements and AI in games, the article is definitely worth a read through. Even if you're not terribly tech savvy, it's an interesting piece to spend some time with.

Fixing Pathfinding Once and For All [Game/AI]

I think that we do have a pretty good understanding what all of the different sections of our fan base are interested in, but it comes back to the thing of, you know, gotta make the game that we think is the best. Certainly, try and take those things into consideration, but there are people in the office who spend 14, 16, 18 hours a day making this game, and sometimes, if you're going to break a tie, you go with our instincts.

Personally, if I spent 18 hours a day working on something, I'd be in a mood much less amenable to taking suggestions from fans, so props to the Bethesda crew. Hines also shared some learning experiences about their AI and the ways they've refined it since the Oblivion days:

Like having somebody go off and get themselves killed while you're in the middle of a forest isn't fun, but it is fun if you walk into a town and everybody is acting in a believable fashion. And when you overhear conversations, they're referring to each other by their first name. Like, it just adds another level to the realism.

So I think we've tried to focus on putting more of that stuff in front of the player, and less stuff like, "Oh, this happened two towns away from you!" Just, hey, by the way. That doesn't mean anything.

The problem is compounded by the fact that it's very much a chicken-and-egg situation — that is, design and AI very often go hand-in-hand. The current state of the art in game AI is very limited by the fact that so many game designers intentionally avoid using AI because they don't understand what's possible ... or they watched other designers make wildly unrealistic promises about AI, and took the wrong lessons from that experience ... or they mistakenly believe we're still stuck in the 1980s and only heavily scripted AI can work. We need to grow out of all that.

Part of the challenge of developing AI is going to involve working on the design side, and pushing designers out of the narrow "comfort zones" they build for themselves. Too many designers are still perfectly happy making zombie games, and that holds us all back.

The original thoughts have spawned some responses on GrandTextAuto and others - worth a read through (especially the comments on the original post!) if you, like me, are interested in the confluence of the academic and actual game design.

Thoughts on Industry / Academic collaboration [Game/AI via GrandTextAuto]

Regarding AI from Microsoft, they actually had 6 different titles in development based on the AI property. You name the genre, there was a game for it: car racing, fighting, adventure, party game, etc. I was working on an adventure/platformer game...then the movie came out. All the titles were quickly scuttled.

We'll have people from India, China, Bangladesh, just about everywhere there's poor people. We figure with eight million people working eighteen hour shifts, that we can satisfy our needs... One time the best enemy character you face may be controlled by Habibul Ashraful from Bangladesh, who only has three fingers, and the next time it may be Li Ming, who farms gold in World of Warcraft.

Yes, and soon Crecente will replace all of us with chain-smoking monkeys that have been handcuffed to a row of typewriters.
Bungie Dumps AI for Cheap Human Intelligence in Halo 3 [The BBSpot]

The concept behind the game is that you're a mafia hitman who can suck power from the darkness, so you spend a lot of time in the game shooting out lights. Once in the dark you can summon up these horrible little darklings that whack people to death with oversized powertools. You can also use your darkness powers to slide through small openings and use streams of darkness to carry or throw things. The whole thing is based on the comic book of the same name and one of the book's writers helped with the storyline.

The concept behind the game has a lot of potential, but the game's AI seemed very weak. In one scene, cops bust into a building to arrest you. After siccing darklings on a couple of cops, the developer walked out to a cop who was standing with his gun raised and pointed through the door. He walked right up to the side of the guy and just started wailing on him. The cop just stood there, looking into the door way.

Later one, the developer found a cop cringing behind a trash can. The guy just squatted there cringing as he fired into him. This sort of AI drives me nuts. The game has been in development for one and a half years and isn't due out until 2007, so I hope they can work on it.

Microsoft sends word that an update for Perfect Dark Zero is coming that will offer up a bunch of new bot personalities to spice up your play.

Each of the eight new bots will have their own personality. For instance, the judge bots will attack the player with the most kills, the bully bots will attack the players with the least and the venge bots will seek the last person that killed it.

Msoft will also be selling four new multiplayer maps for the game through Marketplace.