Live Magazine September 2014 Volume 9/2014 | Page 112

ARTIFICIAL IN
feature

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI or artificial intelligence, is defined
by Wikipedia as “the intelligence exhibited by machines or software.”
While it’s also the study of intelligent
agents, we’re looking at it purely from
a software or hardware perspective.

mode versus online with other players. Responses are different and believable. So how do developers create better AI? Maybe the question
should be, can developers create a
better AI?

Games have been programmed to
emulate a form of intelligence when
characters in a game respond in certain ways. Some games do it amazingly well, like The Last of Us and
Grand Theft Auto. Others fail miserably with characters reacting in ways
that doesn’t make sense. Racing
games feature AI in the way other
drivers react to your moves on the
track. Older games sometimes featured AI that was so simple you could
ask a character a question, walk
away, come back and they’d react in

The field of AI was founded on the
claim that our intelligence could be
simulated by a machine, either robot, computer or other “intelligent”
device. Early computer programs
like Eliza simulated AI by processing a users response to the scripts
programmed into Eliza’s code. They
were very simple forms but were so
well programmed that some users
were taken in and thought they were
communicating with a real computer
intelligence. More recently programs
like A.L.I.C.E take the possibili-

1950 paper - Computing Machinery
and Intelligence.
AI has been featured more recently
in movies such as Her, where the
main character played by Joaquin
Pheonix falls in love with his OS
(operating system) played by Scarlett Johannson. Set in the future,
the movie overcomes the potential
weirdness of a man loving his computer OS by clever use of the way
the system is portrayed and the
way it behaves. At present, we are
a long way off having computer systems anywhere near that intelligent.
Other AI based movies include
2001: A Space Odyssey based on
the novel by Arthur C Clarke, where
the computer system HAL, doesn’t

“GOOD AI INVOLVES YOUR GAME EXPERIENCE TO BE BELIEVABLE”
the same way a thousand times just
as if it was the first encounter.
The challenging thing for game designers is to create character responses that seem natural and not
simplistic. Good AI involves your
game experience to be believable.
When good graphics and sound
work with a believable story line and
believable characters you are more
immersed. Consider the difference
between playing Call of Duty in story

ties further with better logic and responses to your questions. But they
are not perfect, they don’t yet exhibit
enough intelligence to pass what’s
called The Turing Test. This is where
a human engages in a conversation
in natural language with a machine
and, should the human not be able
to tell whether they are talking to a
machine or a human, then it would
be said the machine has passed the
Turing Test. The test was proposed
by mathematician, Alan Turing in his

follow orders by the humans. Wargames featured a very young Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy
who hack into a defence system
causing havoc. AI, released in 2001
by Steven Spielberg, features Haley Joel Osment playing an artificial
boy as well as Jude Law.
While AI in movies makes for an interesting and sometimes provocative story, it’s in games where we
will truly see the possibilities. Imag-