Game AI: The Shrinking Gap Between Computer Games and AI Systems

The introduction of games for benchmarking intelligent systems has a long tradition in AI (Artificial Intelligence) research. Alan Turing was one of the first to mention that a computer can be considered as intelligent if it is able to play chess. Today AI benchmarks are designed to capture difficulties that humans deal with every day. They are carried out on robots with unreliable sensors and actuators or on agents integrated in digital environments that simulate aspects of the real world. One example is given by the annually held RoboCup competitions, where robots compete in a football game but also fight for the rescue of civilians in a simulated large-scale disaster simulation. Besides these scientific events, another environment, also challenging AI, originates from the commercial computer game market. Computer games are nowadays known for their impressive graphics and sound effects. However, the latest generation of game engines shows clearly that the trend leads towards more realistic physics simulations, agent centered perception, and complex player interactions due to the rapidly increasing degrees of freedom that digital characters obtain. This new freedom requests another quality of the player’s environment, a quality of ambient intelligence that appears both plausible and in real time. This intelligence has, for example, to control more than 40 facial muscles of digital characters while they interact with humans, but also to control a team of digital characters for the support of human players. This article emphasizes the current difference between AI systems and digital characters in commercial computer games and emphasizes the advantages that arise if shrinking the gap between them. We sketch some methods currently utilized in RoboCup and relates them to methods found in commercial computer games. We show how methods from RoboCup might contribute to game AI and improve both the performance and plausibility of its digital characters. Furthermore, we describe state-of-the-art game engines and discuss the challenge but also opportunity they are offering to AI research.