[HN Gopher] Game AI Pro
___________________________________________________________________
Game AI Pro
Author : SimplyUseless
Score : 290 points
Date : 2020-02-02 11:31 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gameaipro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gameaipro.com)
| thebrain wrote:
| Download it all with
|
| wget -r -A.pdf http://www.gameaipro.com/
|
| wget -r -A.zip http://www.gameaipro.com/
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That seems a bit rude to me, especially since they
|
| a) sell PDF ebooks
|
| and
|
| b) explicitly say that you are not supposed to re-upload the
| content elsewhere.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Where is this re upload you mention
| oliwarner wrote:
| Why? They've made this all available, why is grabbing it all
| in increase your own convenience (eg offline reading,
| searching) _rude_?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Because when you actually read it, you will download 1
| article per 30 minutes. If you batch-download all of their
| content now, you'll create much more peak load and, hence,
| costs for them.
| oliwarner wrote:
| You can use --limit-rate=500k if you want to limit the
| bandwidth you're consuming.
|
| And load does not translate to cost for everybody. If you
| saturate the connection to my VPS, I don't pay more, it
| just gets slower for everybody in contention. I _can_
| spin up mirrors but if I 'm offering a free resource like
| this, I'd be more likely to limit the bandwidth-per-
| client-IP or just actively let it run slow. They could
| even limit the bandwith to the subdirectory with...
| location /download/ { limit_conn addr 1;
| limit_rate 50k; }
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| So read the wget man page and add settings to your
| liking:
|
| --wait=5000 --random-wait
|
| Done...
| faitswulff wrote:
| On the other hand, if you download it all at once you
| aren't constantly reloading a page when you get back to
| it and you aren't limited to reading it when you're
| online. I do see the point you're making, though I think
| it depends on the author's perspective.
| stevehawk wrote:
| so he should seed a torrent instead of a wget command?
| freepor wrote:
| wget does not re-upload the content elsewhere.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| What a generous gift :)
|
| And even though they gave a talk about in in 2015, their
| "Simplest AI Trick in the Book" is still not implemented by some
| games released nowadays.
|
| In case you don't know it, it's:
|
| 0.2s reaction time for aiming
|
| + 0.4s reaction time for yes/no decisions
|
| + additional delay for ambiguity, surprise, or limited visibility
|
| I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. Just seeing your
| opponent taking a moment to think makes whatever it is they do so
| much more convincing.
| MAXPOOL wrote:
| I am just an NPC until I get coffee.
|
| For AI researcher Game AI is like porn. It's cheap tricks and
| obviously fake but oddly fascinating. Sometimes you find a new
| trick you want to try in real life.
|
| Marvin Minsky once said "I bet the human brain is a kludge." If I
| had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of dirty tricks,
| incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially limited problem
| spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers, not to
| understand the world. Combining many tricks together can create
| illusion of generality that is very convincing.
| echelon wrote:
| > Marvin Minsky
|
| Can we still cite Marvin Minsky in the AI field given the
| allegations that have arisen regarding his relationship with
| Epstein and sex trafficking?
|
| We should find better luminaries.
|
| I'm all for redemption and I hope Stallman comes around and
| apologizes, but Minsky went to the grave with whatever
| happened.
| [deleted]
| Reedx wrote:
| > evolved to pick berries and avoid tigers
|
| Yeah, that's the thing - it evolved for a much different
| environment than the one we find ourselves in today.
|
| Which makes such a difference that some aspects that used to be
| advantages are now disadvantages.
| lonelappde wrote:
| The kludginess of brains is textbook neuroscience, from
| instincts to reflexes, to illusions and more.
|
| Indeed, Game AI puts the "Game" first -- as it should for
| Games, but to the detriment of anyone who cares more about AI
| and wants Games to be a fun place to study AI.
|
| If we split Game AI into "problem solving" (like pathfinding)
| and "opponent personality", then we can recover a lot of good
| AI that generalizes beyond games, without being misled by the
| parts that only useful for tricking people in a toy
| environment.
| MereInterest wrote:
| > If I had to bet, I would say that human brain is full of
| dirty tricks, incomplete solutions, shortcuts and artificially
| limited problem spaces evolved to pick berries and avoid
| tigers, not to understand the world.
|
| Wikipedia has an interesting list of cognitive biases [1].
| Going through these, I tend to think of all of them as
| heuristic failures, where those shortcuts and incomplete
| solutions are pushed to edge cases.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd go further and conjecture that our cognitive biases are
| _necessary_ , that the "theoretically perfect" models that
| these biases are compared against when being called biases
| are actually spherical cows in a vacuum.
|
| However, I'm not a neuroscientist, and my knowledge and use
| of A.I. is limited to hobby projects.
| nwienert wrote:
| I'd take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible.
| The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition.
| And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks
| at all.
|
| Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the
| appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought
| priming and all these "tricks" were things and then the crisis
| and Kahneman et al were debunked.
|
| I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be
| to do the incredible complex things we do, and we're just so
| far from really understanding it that we run around
| appendicizing all sorts of things we just don't really know
| well yet.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has
| to be to do the incredible complex things we do
|
| But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.
| nwienert wrote:
| Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the
| brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly
| flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It
| "has to be" incredibly good at so many things - it's
| basically the perfect general computation machine. It "has
| to be" not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where
| scientists were all about showing how humans were easily
| fallible and much of that was debunked.
|
| Sorry but you're not following my point or his if you think
| they agree.
| grawprog wrote:
| >I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has
| incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or
| shortcuts.
|
| Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts
| are what give the human brain it's fantastic
| adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing
| necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the
| human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've
| got millions of people each with their own duct tape and
| shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does
| things just a little bit differently, we see other humans
| with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some
| duct tape and we get better at things or learn something
| new. Do this over millions of years and generations and
| you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped
| together millions of years worth duct taped together
| solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our
| giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.
| nwienert wrote:
| I just don't think in millions of years of evolution the
| shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the
| result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of
| time.
|
| It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want
| to use a duct tape analogy. I think it's because
| programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a
| brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn
| duct tape if you want to get anywhere useful. Meanwhile a
| brain literally requires as little duct tape as possible
| if you want it to be generally good.
| dkersten wrote:
| The cognitive biases linked in another comment and other
| general failure of our reasoning and logic (or even how
| our pattern matchers work too well, seeing patterns where
| there are none, looking at you, clown-shaped-cloud) tells
| me that there are still shortcuts, errors and less-than-
| elegant. We make mistakes in reason and thought all the
| time, sometimes fatally. I don't think that diminishes
| from how incredible the brain is and how adaptable and
| generalised its function is, I just don't believe that it
| doesn't take shortcuts given all of the errors we make.
|
| I'm a hobbyist at sleight-of-hand magic and therefore
| like to read and watch lots of material on the matter (eg
| the book "Sleights of Mind" by neuroscientists Stephen
| Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, and science writer
| Sandra Blakeslee) and there are an incredibly many ways
| to fool or trick the brain into believing untruths, even
| obvious ones.
| nwienert wrote:
| Sleights of hand are not proof the brain is failing in
| any way. That our visual processing is limited is not a
| sign that the brain is somehow taping together systems in
| poor ways.
|
| Cognitive biases were also incredibly exaggerated and if
| you've read into the replication crisis and various
| pushback Kahneman has gotten on his studies you'll find
| much of what we call cognitive bias was wrong or
| exaggerated.
|
| That we figure out super inventive ways to trick others
| into thinking we're not smart is just more proof of how
| clever we really can be.
|
| A great example is loss aversion which, if you read the
| debate around, is a totally smart strategy given we have
| absorption barriers.
|
| That I pay attention to things in a certain way that
| allows magicians to fool me in predictable ways doesn't
| mean our brains are failing in some way - it means they
| are making a trade off that helped us survive better with
| the given processing power we have. But that trade off is
| almost certainly the smart trade off, and labeling it
| "kludgy" is lazy thinking.
| dkersten wrote:
| > Sleights of hand are not proof the brain is failing in
| any way
|
| You missed the point of what I was saying, which is that
| because of my interest in sleight of hand, I spend a lot
| of time reading and watching different material on
| "magic", the book Sleights of Mind being such material.
| Its not about sleight of hand, but rather that it's easy
| to trick the mind into believing things. Also, most
| sleight of hand isn't really about what our eyes see at
| all, but more about masking actions -- hiding one action
| with a bigger action or through misdirection, making use
| of the fact that our minds find it hard to focus on
| multiple things at once. I would say most sleight of hand
| tricks are about curating what the other person
| perceives. Sure, sometimes its by hiding what is being
| done from the eyes, but often its doing something in
| plain sight but in a way that the spectators don't
| connect the dots.
|
| From the wikipedia synopsis of Sleights of Mind: _"
| Macknik and Martinez-Conde say that magic tricks fool us
| because humans have hardwired processes of attention and
| awareness that are hackable. Good magicians use our
| inherent mental and neural limitations against us by
| leading us to perceive and feel what we are
| neurologically inclined to."_
|
| I'll give you a simple example:
|
| In card magic, using a concept known to magicians as
| "time misdirection" (that is, by putting time between
| cause and effect), spectators often retell the
| performance as having happened in their hands, even when
| they never actually touched the cards.
|
| The book and other material has more. The point is that
| our brains piece together incomplete information and make
| assumptions. We see what we expect to see, hear what we
| expect to hear. Our brains pattern match and see patterns
| in noise.
|
| I'm not saying that this isn't useful to our survival, if
| you look at the outer ring of this image from
| wikipedia[1], it shows that there are very good and
| valuable reasons why we do these things, but they still
| lead us to make mistakes, errors, wrong assumptions or
| act illogically, sometimes to disastrous effect. I'm not
| and didn't say it was a "kludge" exactly, but I do think
| that the brain is taking less-than-perfect shortcuts (to
| save time, memory or make up for too much/too little/too
| noisy information).
|
| [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/C
| ognitiv...
| grawprog wrote:
| >It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want
| to use a duct tape analogy.
|
| I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the
| way I learn and the way i've watched other people learn
| or the way i've seen people learn while i've been
| teaching them or training them. That and the general way
| everything kind of works. As amazing as everything in the
| world seems, when you break everything down to the
| smallest components, they all rely on the same skills and
| techniques we've been using since we were picking berries
| and hunting mammoths. The materials, accuracy and scales
| of our work have changed and improved dramatically, but
| fundamentally, most of what we do can be traced back to
| the same old things we've always done. We're just really
| good at building on layers and layers of things and
| applying things and knowledge to novel concepts and
| ideas.
|
| Take music for an example, we just keep making the same
| music over and over and over again, yet we still find new
| and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the
| point where most people don't realize they've been
| listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last
| 100 years or so at least.
| nwienert wrote:
| Your music example is just wrong. Music has changed
| consistently, constantly and honestly miraculously and in
| such beautiful ways over the years. From all the great
| classical geniuses to jazz to the extraordinary advances
| in sound design and mixing, avante garde and experimental
| new styles that show up year after year, I mean that's
| your example? Sorry, but disagree, strongly.
| joenot443 wrote:
| > we just keep making the same music over and over and
| over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make
| it sound different and new to the point where most people
| don't realize they've been listening to the same few
| songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.
|
| What do you mean by this? Oftentimes I see people
| reaching the conclusion that because a lot of modern
| music is built around the same major scales and largely
| homogenous chord progressions, it must be the same, but
| this simply isn't the case.
| grawprog wrote:
| >a lot of modern music is built around the same major
| scales and largely homogenous chord progressions, it must
| be the same, but this simply isn't the case.
|
| But it is, to the point where there's songs I learn only
| somewhat and i'll get confused to which lyrics are which
| and I'll sing a mix of the two songs when playing them,
| imagine and no woman no cry jump are two it happens to me
| with all the time. Same with truly madly deeply and
| kryptonite oddly enough. Then there's the whole
| pachabel's canon meme which is entirely true. There's a
| few songs, the most recent is some maroon 5 and i think a
| jonas brother's song which I was confused as hell as to
| why I liked until I realized they're just another rework
| of canon.
|
| That's not even getting started on the direct ripoffs
| such as the 1000'@ of songs based on the Amen break or
| the thousands of songs that are basically a simple 8 or
| 12 bar blues progression or the tangled web of constant
| remakes that is reggae and dancehall and every song that
| lifts a bassline or melody from them without credit all
| the way up to such obscure things as the friendly
| neighbours tune from earthbound being a relick of the
| real rock riddim.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many
| uses.
|
| Can you elaborate?
|
| I recently learned that current appendectomy procedure (at
| least in Europe) calls for the removal of the appendix even
| if a surgery should reveal that the organ is in fact
| completely healthy - because the procedure from that point is
| considered so unrisky, and the organ considered so useless,
| that the potential future risk of a medical professional
| misinterpreting the existence of an operational scar as an
| indicator of a previously performed appendectomy is deemed
| more problematic.
| chychiu wrote:
| One recent theory suggests that the appendix acts as a
| safehouse for beneficial gut bacteria in the event that the
| gut microflora is wiped out:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551545/
| SergeAx wrote:
| Shouldn't it have (2017) in title?
| SloopJon wrote:
| "All chapters are available to download as of September 2019."
| syspec wrote:
| The RVO chapter, and that concept I general is an amazing one
| because they really created a method for 2 autonomous characters
| avoiding collisions on a natural way - with code that is easy to
| understand
| Jahak wrote:
| Thank you very much!
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| Love these books. Two techniques I've found hugely valuable in
| practice are utility-based AI and flow field pathfinding/goal
| seeking.
| mottosso wrote:
| Does anyone know the reason why they suddenly became free?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Yeah this is awesome
| bdickason wrote:
| Very cool. I always expect a link like this to either be some
| super basic examples (e.g. how to implement flocking) or articles
| detailing techniques used in games from ~20 years ago.
|
| Very cool how recent and modern these are (along with super
| reputable authors)
| [deleted]
| KenanSulayman wrote:
| Is this directly from the authors? If yes, I'm a bit shocked
| given the prices for the book when searching for ed 1, ed 2 and
| ed 3 on Google. Please add a donation button to the site.
|
| I just finished the first four sections and I love it. Thanks a
| lot!
| coder1001 wrote:
| Thank! Nice to see people releasing this kind of material for
| free!
| spmealin wrote:
| What a cool and useful resource. Unfortunately, all of the pdf
| files are inaccessible to assistive technology (such as screen
| readers).
| bmn__ wrote:
| What makes you think so? I tested book 3 chapter 1 with Okular
| and Festival plugin, works fine.
| The_mboga_real wrote:
| Great work! Have you considered looking into human gaming
| practices that border on the unethical and unfair?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about trying to make an AI for a turn
| based 4X game. I believe an AI that could defeat the strongest
| human players in (for example) Civilization would be more
| impressive than AlphaStar and the Dota AIs.
|
| I think it might give the gaming industry a kick in the pants to
| start utilizing more advance AI techniques in general, since it
| seems almost all discussions of strong AI in games are dominated
| by apologists explaining why it's not practical. Just one example
| of strong AI in a successful game would change the industry.
|
| After strong AIs are common, we can persue the even more
| interesting task of dumbing them down in fun ways.
| dkersten wrote:
| Having an AI defeat the strongest human players (without
| cheating) isn't often the hard part, its making it fun,
| believable, interesting or, indeed, beatable (its no fun if you
| can never ever win) is often the hard part. A perfectly
| minmaxing AI that makes perfect decisions isn't very
| interesting to players. Outsmarting players in interesting ways
| is, well, interesting, but just always playing the best move in
| any given scenario (like what deep blue did with its search-
| based "AI") can create perfect play if the search space is
| within the bounds of time/memory of the AI, but that's not very
| interesting to play against or watch.
| dmix wrote:
| > Unfortunately, the time between seeing a decision acted out and
| the actual act of making that decision can mean that all relevant
| information has already been discarded. Ideally if the entire
| game simu-lation could be rewound to the exact moment in time
| when the error occurred, it would make notoriously difficult
| problems to debug, trivial to understand why they occurred.
|
| > Game engines have typically made reproducing these types of
| problems easier using deterministic playback methods (Dickinson
| 2001), where the entire state of the game simu-lation can jump
| back in time and resimulate the same problem over and over
| (Llopis 2008).
|
| Imagine if you could do this for _all_ programming? [from chapter
| 6]
| anarazel wrote:
| > Imagine if you could do this for all programming? [from
| chapter 6]
|
| rr comes pretty close. https://rr-project.org/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-02-02 23:00 UTC)