If you think that artificial intelligences that actively attack and try to kill its human counterparts are just a hypothetical idea that might never come to reality, you might be mistaken.

The gaming industry has been training gruesome robots, mighty automated armies and deadly opponents for years now. So one might wonder, how dangerous are these algorithms really?

I was inspired to write a bit about this topic by a comment from Horus Aha on last weeks article about Ray Kurzweil’s talk on the Future in Gaming at the Games Developer Conference:

Lots of investment in making game AI’s that are basically sociopathic killers explicitly designed to effectively compete against humans. This applies in 1st person shooters, but also to other genres. The games are networked and it is possible that the AI’s in these games may learn how to game-the-game by finding ways to compete with players outside of game environments. Why not? I don’t think anybody would have taken warnings about “gold-farming” seriously until it was already a reality.

Now, is this fear justified? Are we really endangered by computer game AI?

No.

AI in the entertainment industry is incredibly dumb. The are a couple of reasons for that. Probably the most important is that the game developers do not want an intelligence that can out-reason humans and win all the time: The goal is making an AI that plays to lose, not to win. It is a well-known psychological fact that an opponent that almost beats but eventually loses against the player is most enjoyable for him (There was a good presentation about that from Soren Johnson at this year’s GDC called Playing to Lose: AI and “CIVILIZATION”).

But don’t we need a proper AI to be able to figure out how to achieve this? When you look at the concepts of AI in games and talk to game developers it quickly becomes clear that they don’t even try to make a learning or guessing AI: They cheat! Faking intelligence is a lot easier than actually achieving proper reasoning. In almost all games with incomplete information, i.e., a fog of war or hidden objects, the AI is given full information and only pretends to not know where you are and what you do. And if you see a really smart manoeuvre from the enemy troops (or your virtual team-mates) it is hard-coded or pre-scripted very often. I attended the AI roundtable talks at the GDC in San Francisco two weeks ago and almost none of the attending developers (who worked on Bioshock, Halo3, The Sims, Command & Conquer etc.) has used any of the “proper” academic AI algorithms like neural networks or genetic algorithms.

There are some exceptions, for example Black & White uses a simple reinforcement learning algorithm to make the creature learn from your actions. F.E.A.R. is an often cited example of real planning in a game, however, the used algorithm is really simple and some argue that the resulting behaviour could have been achieved with pre-written scripts just as well.

So there’s no real, potentially dangerous, intelligence in games at all. This is why the AI Panic Level drops by -5%, the “sociopathic killers” will not be able to escape the virtual world of computer games for a long time. If at all, they will become smart only by developments outside the games industry, for example academic research.

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