2/9/2008 - Assassin's Creed Guard Love

It's amazing to see how far artificial intelligence in video games have come. I've heard that in the original Pac-Man, there would be a pattern in the way the ghosts move and that you can play a perfect game by simply knowing the pattern. Obviously, if this was the case, then there was no sophisticated A.I. in that game, even if you thought that the ghosts were scheming against you.

Even in the side-scrolling days of gaming, there would always be a pattern to the enemies and that the way they could beat the human-controlled characters would be to have quicker attacks or programmed with inherent advantages like better weapons. When fighting games came around, this lack of true artificial intelligence meant that the computer-controlled characters would "cheat". I see this prominently in the Street Fighter II games where the computer would immediately respond to one of your attacks with the only attack that could counter it. This may be possible within the design of the game, but the split-second manner in which the counter-attack is pulled off is humanly impossible. The computer would also "cheat" by pulling off charged special moves without charging, something that definitely could not be done by a human.

Despite these advantages, the computer can be beat because eventually you will start to recognize the pattern and take your own advantage. These patterns are actually deliberately programmed into boss characters and it gives you a kind of satisfaction to recognize them and using it to beat the game.

A.I. in video games made its biggest leap when first-person shooters came around. In the more difficult single-player campaigns you'll see the enemy use cover effectively and try to surround you. Perhaps because FPS's take place in a 3-D environment, you are less able to discern any patterns that are programmed into the computer opponents. However, it is a necessity to make the enemy smarter in these games, otherwise the difference between playing against the computer and another human being would be far too great. For a real challenge, nothing will ever beat going online against the hardcore gamers.

Still, with the tremendous processing power of today's consoles it is getting to the point where computer-controlled enemies will be programmed with artificial intelligence that make them more natural and almost human. Take the next-gen video game Assassin's Creed, for example. Your character is in the middle of an entire city packed with computer-controlled characters that are doing "everyday" things like shopping at markets, conversing with one another, and even committing petty theft. They do so in such a naturalistic way that the experience that it all really does seem like real life. In fact, it's a little scary to see how some characters behave:



It just proves that bots have to get off too...