Artificial Intelligence is a topic that has received much attention in relation to Spore. For anyone who's a little unsure about what exactly Artificial Intelligence is, here is a simple definition I pulled from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
artificial intelligence (n)
1: a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers
2: the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior
When it comes to Spore, you can just start to see the basic introduction of AI. In Spore, the game play enables a great deal of user freedom because it "adapts" to the player's wants and needs. For example, when a player chooses to have their creature become an herbivore instead of a carnivore, there is a change in how the creatures within a tribe socialize with one another. They slowly begin to talk and play, whereas a tribe of carnivores socializes by wrestling. Although this may seem like a neat little bit of AI, this doesn't even scratch the surface of what Will Wright believes computers will be capable of within the next decade.
I recently read an extremely interesting article about AI in the online version of Popular Mechanics, where Will Wright shared his views on the subject. In this article, Wright introduces 5 prophecies about AI. Here is the list, but if you want to go more in-depth into them I recommend reading the article:
1. Machines will never achieve human intelligence
2. Your sim will be used against you (kind of)
3. Games will write themselves
4. Hive minds will be lots of fun
5. Machines will boot-strap their way to sentience
Let me give a brief explanation about what these prophecies are saying. Wright came up with the first prediction based on the fact that "computers aren't great at fundamentally recreating intelligence, but they're great at harvesting intelligence." He also says that machines are unlikely to ever be able to be creative; creativity is unique to human intelligence. In the case of Spore, I am the one who creates my unique creatures and buildings based on my own creative state of mind at the time. It would take a lot of "learning" on the computer's part to discover how exactly to create a unique creature based on my style of play, likes and dislikes. This leads into Wright's second prediction that computers are going to have to gather and piece together data about humans in order to be able to understand us and see what motivates us. Wright specifically uses The Sims as an example for how computers can learn more about human behavior. In the third prediction that games will write themselves, Wright believes that games will become more personalized because the longer you play, the more specific the game will become (based on concepts in the second prediction). I thought that the fourth prediction was the most interesting. Here, the computers will get to the point where they will be able to "share notes" on the data they've been collecting from humans in order to analyze trends and apply them to the individual. Finally, the fifth prediction says that computers will be able to continually upgrade new versions of their AI until they can "boot-strap" their way up the path toward sentience.
Sounds a little scary, right? I'll admit that the whole idea of AI is a little disturbing, and yet extremely impressive at the same time. I'm absolutely positive that we're going to hit all of Wright's predictions in the near future and it's going to completely change the face of gaming as we know it. Gamers will finally have complete freedom in all aspects of a game and each time you pick up a controller, you won't know what to expect. And what's to say it will stop there? Here's one of my predictions about AI: It's going to have a serious impact on education. When a student gets an assignment to write a 10-page paper about the French Revolution, he or she will open a word document, type the subject into a box, and the computer will bang out the paper in seconds based on the information it's gained about its owner's typical writing style and voice (this information will gradually increase with each paper the student writes over a period of time). It seems unlikely, but we could easily be heading that way depending on how AI develops. Who knows what we'll do at that point? It's a little disturbing to think that one day my computer could be the new HAL. If it gets to that point, it's comforting to know that we (as humans) will always have the ability to bash in the screen with a baseball bat if computers try to take over. For now, I'm not planning on worrying about it though. I think it will be interesting to see how AI progresses from games such as Spore to future games. That's something I'm very excited to see.
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I had been waiting to comment where the rest of the class could see it, but better to at least comment where you'll see it. I like these posts. Related to Wright's first point, this should be seen as a very fruitful development in the history of AI, to not worry so much about making machines behave like humans but to focus on making them smart in certain specific ways. Donald Norman writes good books (like The Design of Everyday Things) where he argues much the same. The use of AI is in being able to augment human intelligence, to make up for what we're not that good at, more than it is to replace us. Of course these Frontiers don't remain for long, and outside of specialist circles, few people understand the processes of extent of machine learning. Of course gamers still complain a great deal about not having great AI. It's like the flying car, always just around the corner.
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