AI and games All your games are belong to us by Dr Tommy Thompson
Welcome to our new regular discussion on games AI, written by Dr Tommy Thompson. He’s the creator of the Patreon-funded ‘AI and Games’ series on YouTube and a freelance AI consultant to the games industry. Thompson is an active game AI researcher, senior lecturer in computer science and an independent video game developer. He founded his own company Table i ames ith his rst ame Sure ootin out on Steam and comin to consoles in 2019
IT’S hard to go a day in the tech-world nowadays without reading a headline about artificial intelligence, with every new breakthrough accompanied by a fresh take on the robot driven apocalypse it will bring forth ideo games are increasingly prominent in A news, mostly because they re learning to play them achine learning systems taking on the world s best at the likes of Dota 2 and StarCraft II isn’t the end of the world as we know it, it s ust the ne t step of a long and storied relationship between the two industries. Artificial intelligence is all about building software that is autonomous thinks for itself and rational does the best it can with what it knows and while in most sectors A is sought for optimisation or e ciency, the games industry provides one of the most novel applications: entertainment. This ranges from non-player characters in Call of Duty to squads in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, procedurally building worlds in No Man’s Sky or characters in Sea of Thieves n many of these instances, the best solution is either too sub ective to quantify, or ust not any fun to play against n providing an enemy for players, A is sought more to provide theatre rather than challenge, given it s no fun if opponents are landing pistol headshots with perfect accuracy. ver the last to years game A has carved its own niche that bridges the two disciplines his resulted in innovations for combat in games such as the NPCs in F.E.A.R. and the director AI hunting players in Left 4 Dead, all the way to more contemporary releases such
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