Our buddy Corvus asks for this month's Blogs of the Round Table: "AI: Beauty or Beast? This month’s topic is artificial intelligence. What does it mean to current games? What should it mean? How far have we come? How far do we have to go? Does what we call AI in games bear any resemblance to AI as understood by other industries? Should it? Are we currently using AI to its fullest advantage? Are we using it for the right things? No matter your approach, whether technical, historical, tragical, comical, artisical, musical, tragi-comical, or techno-tragi-comi-arti-musical, use this month’s topic (artificial intelligence if you’ve forgotten already) to grab AI by the lapels and shake until you just can’t shake anymore."

And I thought about it.

I thought about it in terms of my experience with Machine Learning, pattern recognition, neural networks and liquid state machines, cognitive sciences, behavioral conditions and test, perfect checkers games and games of chess I'll never win against a computer.

I thought about NPC's that ducked behind crates in first person shooters (does it have to be a crate?), and the first time I gave the goons in my Shadowrun games families and friends, and how they started ducking behind dumpsters in firefights too when I did that.

I thought about it so much I even forced myself to watch Stephen Spielberg's movie of the same name (I had forgotten how truly awful it was). I downloaded Facade, and did everything in my power to keep Grace and Trip together (although I failed each time). I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and wanting to write something intelligent to say about the proper application and the unexplored frontiers of Artificial Intelligence in games.

Last night I was thinking about it again in an empty blog post window at around 1 in the morning when I fell asleep and had a dream.

In the dream I was in a room with mechas from Stephen Spielberg's movie: Mechanized humans which when you look at them are completely indistinguishable from the real thing. I remember being excited at the chance to test their limits, and see what these things are really capable of. So I went up to the first male mecha, a smartly dressed English looking chap in a suit with an emblem on it classifying him as the smartest mecha alive, not entirely unlike A.I.'s Dr. Who, so I asked him what would be required to travel backwards in time (I figure we got forward figured out pretty well), and we embark on a rollicking journey though the annuls of relatively and special relatively and tachyons and extra dimensions and string theory and M-theory and so on and so fourth.

After a bit I tired of the depth of the topic, and with a wave of my hand I dismissed it, flowing effortlessly to, "What is the reason for life?" upon which he instantly started down the whole carbon cycle only to have me interrupt him, and say, "Let me rephrase that, why is the reason for life?" to which is had a rather surprising answer, one I could only really describe as a mixture of religion, science, and philosophy as distilled from all the great theologians, scientists, and philosophers in existence.

I was bored.

So I left.

I walked away from the mecha, and over to a door that had a sign on it that said, "You can't ever go back." (another line from A.I. I believe, Jude Law said it to the girl before he boinked her), and after pausing to read it I pushed through the door, which slammed shut behind me with a muffled slam.

I found myself in a new room where my fiancé stood. I looked into her beautiful eyes, and she smiled that genuine smile at me...

I woke up. And that's when it dawned on me what I had to write about with regards to this topic.

What place does Artificial Intelligence hold in games as far as Verse Studios is concerned?

None at all.

At least not in the way it's meant here. As far as we are concerned, there is no substitution for Genuine Intelligence, and trying to remove the human aspect, the human condition from the equation is a fallacy into and of itself. AI is another way of modeling the very thing that we ourselves bring to a game when we play it: The human condition. That fact that we are imperfect, that we play a game knowing full well that it will end in an unsatisfactory "Game Over", or that there's a wrong way to do something that will lead to failure or lack of success dictates that the human condition is actually a vital aspect of the experience. Humans create games for humans to experience them, and to date, that has not changed, and it's not looking likely to any time soon either. Trying to model a machine as "thinking" is still inappropriate, even in situations where deductive and inductive logic is applied, because in the absence of new stimulation, there's always a finite set of deductions to be made.

This is easily expressed in the linear-story game which you play once and put away, when compared to the ever evolving experience of a frequently updated and well modeled community/online based game. It's our strong belief that the social aspect... that human condition... is what makes online games in particular so much fun and keeps us coming back to them time after time after time.

It's not to say that AI isn't important (it is), or hasn't come a very long way (it has), it's just as far as I know it doesn't get any better than the real thing.