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Comment by 60654 | Hacker News Reader

It's a nice historical overview of using search and ML for formal games like chess.

But - this is not the game developer usage of "game AI". Where are wargames, where are artificial characters, where is interactive storytelling, where are realtime control systems, and so on, and so forth? The doc is missing a lot of the actual history of game AI, which is much wider and more varied than presented here (and ML approaches are still in minority).

Anyone interested in game AI history should definitely check out the past proceedings of the AIIDE conference: http://www.aiide.org

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You are being pedantic - it is pretty clear from the intro I am summarizing the history of AI research into playing games and mean that by 'Game AI'; there is not a single reference to video games, and indeed it would be ridicolous to try and include any amount of summary of that since most video game AI is a lot more heuristic/hacked together/ad hoc that the Game AI stuff I summarized.

What are you talking about. Storytelling is not part of game AI. Not for Chess. At best, the storytelling can be considered to be purposely making the AI consider fewer ply of moves, to create a more fun experience for lower leveled players.

I can't tell if you're trolling or are just not up to date on game AI, so assuming the latter: you have to think beyond chess. There's much more info on interactive storytelling in the AIIDE proceedings I linked to, it's a very active area of research. Academically it goes back at least to the mid 90s, Oz project at CMU for example, or MIT Media Lab projects. And in commercial production, interactive stories are as old as the industry, probably the best early example is Infocom but back then there wasn't much AI driving it; it's not until the 2000s that people started actually building "drama managers" for shipping games to introduce dramatic conflict dynamically.

You can measure research on lots of directions. The purpose of AlphaGo was to win the game, so discussion about AI which are not built to win is largely irrelevant. The difficulty of Go had nothing to do with creating tension (where in many games humans play, AI players can trivially win if the designers wanted them to). In Go this was not the case, as AI lagged behind grandmaster play significantly. Thus, the discussion of research that interests you that has nothing to do with the goals of Go AI, is tangential at best. It's not fair to say the article is faulty just because you wanted them to discuss your favorite research conference.

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