The Last Moments Of GAME 
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If you can get past the skin-soft silicon, the oversexualised mouth, the transparent nightie and uncomfortably-separated thighs, Douglas Hines latest invention could offer some interesting insight into the way games interact with people.
The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) is hosting a StarCraft competition where contestants craft bots to pit against one another in four different tournaments.
EVE Online players had better start gearing up for battle now, as the Apocrypha expansion unleashes a whole new breed of tougher non-player character enemies upon the universe.
Emotional attachment is a rare quality in video games. It takes a particular combination of good writing and good design to draw you in to a character’s world and stop you seeing an avatar as just another bunch of pixels.
AI startup Artificial Technology reckons it has a way to inject a little life into the dead-eyed puppets that populate most games. EKI One is AI middleware that Artificial Technology claim can give characters ‘Intelligent and emotional behaviour’ to enhance the game experience.
Quite how this is achieved is unclear (and probably NDA’d to the hilt) but the company say that gamers will “experience the story together with the characters and share the emotions of joy, anger, desire, rage and sorrow”.
Sounds great, no? If you want to see the tech in action, you shouldn’t have long to wait. German developer Twintime has licenced EKI One for its upcoming mystery game Odessa Twins.
Artificial Technology unveils EKI One [Develop]
The latest Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research contains new information on the future downfall of mankind. In particular, it contains details on a study by which an artificial intelligence was taught how to play Ms Pac-Man by some researchers from Eotvos University, in Hungary. This is a big deal, because previously the only games an AI could be taught were much simpler stuff, like chess (Ms Pac-Man’s ghosts don’t follow a routine, making it much more complex). By “teaching” it how to prioritise the stuff it’s taught after repeated instruction, the AI soon learned the most important thing to do in the game was avoid being eaten by a ghost, and that if the ghosts can be eaten, they should be eaten, because that earns the player points. Taking these to heart, the AI was pitted against 10 pathetic, human fleshbags. Those humans played 5 games each, and their average score was 8064. The AI then played 50 games, and its average score was…8186. Ms. Pac-Man Plays Herself [Robot News World, via Boing-Boing]
