And, yeah, the only good storytellers around are humans (Pan narrans, to quote The Science of Discworld II); the task is pretty well certain to be AI-complete--even most humans don't manage it very well, after all.
I don't know if this logically follows: essentially the same statement has been made in lots of fields, until people found the right "cheats" to be able to produce decent algorithmic approximations.
I mean, think about chess. Once upon a time, this was viewed as the canonical AI problem: a computer couldn't "think" abstractly enough to beat a human. Then clever algorithms and brute force came along, and lo -- master chess players started to be defeated by them. The computer doesn't go about it in anything like the same *way* a person does, but it still accomplishes the goal.
Another good example is the Thief engine. This produces in-game characters that move and sound astonishingly real sometimes. But it's all smoke and mirrors: carefully-constructed scenarios and well-designed stimulus-response engines, with just enough degree of freedom to appear real while still being deterministic under the hood.
Personally, I think it's mainly a matter of analysis. Truth to tell, I've given this question at least some lightweight thought -- back when I was at Looking Glass, we did a proposal for Ultima Underworld Online that was fundamentally grounded in this. I don't remember all of the handwaves, but the high concept was that we would use a combination of semi-randomness, control of world events and observation of user actions to create a concept of "destiny" for users: we would have oracles that would steer users in fluidly-evolving campaigns with as much thematic unity as we could accomplish. I have no illusions that this would have been perfect, nor that it would be easy to do at all, but I'm fairly confident that we could have come up with "cheats" that gave a good measure of story-like flavor without any real intelligence being involved at all.
Computer games are entirely the art of illusion. The most successful ones are usually the ones that understand that fact, analyzing the surface aspects of their problem space to simplify out the key facets. The resulting illusion isn't perfect, but can be plenty good enough if you constrain the problem space carefully...
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Re: Competition
Date: 2004-05-13 06:26 pm (UTC)I don't know if this logically follows: essentially the same statement has been made in lots of fields, until people found the right "cheats" to be able to produce decent algorithmic approximations.
I mean, think about chess. Once upon a time, this was viewed as the canonical AI problem: a computer couldn't "think" abstractly enough to beat a human. Then clever algorithms and brute force came along, and lo -- master chess players started to be defeated by them. The computer doesn't go about it in anything like the same *way* a person does, but it still accomplishes the goal.
Another good example is the Thief engine. This produces in-game characters that move and sound astonishingly real sometimes. But it's all smoke and mirrors: carefully-constructed scenarios and well-designed stimulus-response engines, with just enough degree of freedom to appear real while still being deterministic under the hood.
Personally, I think it's mainly a matter of analysis. Truth to tell, I've given this question at least some lightweight thought -- back when I was at Looking Glass, we did a proposal for Ultima Underworld Online that was fundamentally grounded in this. I don't remember all of the handwaves, but the high concept was that we would use a combination of semi-randomness, control of world events and observation of user actions to create a concept of "destiny" for users: we would have oracles that would steer users in fluidly-evolving campaigns with as much thematic unity as we could accomplish. I have no illusions that this would have been perfect, nor that it would be easy to do at all, but I'm fairly confident that we could have come up with "cheats" that gave a good measure of story-like flavor without any real intelligence being involved at all.
Computer games are entirely the art of illusion. The most successful ones are usually the ones that understand that fact, analyzing the surface aspects of their problem space to simplify out the key facets. The resulting illusion isn't perfect, but can be plenty good enough if you constrain the problem space carefully...