DailyDirt: Computers Are Learning How To Play More Video Games, But They'll Never Appreciate A Good Game?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Researchers can program computers to play all kinds of games and even beat the best humans at them. So far, we're not worried about AI that can beat us at chess or Jeopardy, but maybe we'll be more worried when a computer can program another computer to play chess at a grandmaster level. Luckily, there's at least one billionaire willing to chip in a few million bucks to try to keep Terminators from destroying humanity.- Google DeepMind has created software that can play old Atari games without humans teaching it how to play -- and the AI plays 22 out of 49 games better than expert human players. Those Atari games are more difficult than you might think, but it's not hard to imagine that humans will be no match for AI playing Pac-man in the near future. [url]
- A Civilization V match pitted 42 computer-controlled players against each other. It wasn't an endless match (sorry, no Wargames conclusion), and a winner of this "Battle Royale" emerged after 179 turns. [url]
- Flappy Bird is a pretty hard game for humans to play, but a robot can play it without getting tired or frustrated. It's not exactly a breakthrough in robotics, but this bot demonstrates a big difference in how computers play video games. [url]
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Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, atari, civilization v, elon musk, flappy bird, game algorithms, machine learning, robotics, video games, wargames
Companies: deepmind, google
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Civ V match
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There's no correlation between simple graphics and ease of gameplay. A game can have state of the art graphics and be a cakewalk to play, or have really simple graphics and be insanely difficult.
Plus, many later Atari games were quite deep for the time. Games like Tunnel Runner, Escape from the Mindmaster, Dragonstomper, Star Raiders, Mountain King, Montezuma's Revenge, Solaris, etc.
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Or quality of gameplay. Most of the games that are the most fun to play happen to be older ones with low quality graphics. I have noticed, personally, that there is a loose inverse correlation between graphics quality and game quality: much like with movies, the better the graphics the higher the odds that the game isn't that good. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but it seem a good rule of thumb. I think it has a lot to do with where the development resources are used.
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Today it seems that graphics are considered more important than good gameplay.
Although I'm guilty of liking gorgeous graphics, I don't like a lot of conventions used in modern games. Like the over use of cutscenes/FMVs, having the game be stuck in a sort of permanent tutorial mode (Press [X] to open door!), not allowing you to explore, having to press a separate key to "aim", including DLC in the game which is unlocked with a code that you buy, DLC that should have been in the base game, achievements for every stupid thing you do in the game (Achievement unlocked: Standing in place for ten seconds!), motion blur, haze making everything look like there's a smog problem, extensive focus on multi-player with the single-player campaign treated almost as an afterthought, separate camera controls in third-person games (is there anyone who though that Jedi Academy was difficult to play because you couldn't look at your character from any angle?), automatically regenerating health, using checkpoints rather than allowing you to save the game, and more that I'm probably forgetting.
I don't have a state of the art system, but even if I did, I'd still prefer playing many of the older games over anything newer. Plus, the fact that I refuse to buy any games that requires online activation (Steam, Origin, etc) means that there's virtually nothing today that I would be willing to spend money on.
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