Wooden-Robot.net

Making games more fun with artificial stupidity
Posted on March 21st by david
If one buys into Daniel Dennett's proposed use of "the intentional stance" to generate explanations and predictions of human behavior (say, in an AI program that observes a person and tries to find ways of helping), then accounting for human error is a tough problem (because the stance assumes rationality and errors aren't rational). That's one reason I'm interested in errors. Game AI faces a similar problem in that some games like chess and pool/billiards allow a computer player to make very good predictions many steps ahead, often beyond the ability of human players. Such near-optimal skill makes the computer players not much fun. One has to find ways of making the computers appear to play at a similar level of skill as whatever human they play against. I just came across a very interesting article on the topic of how to make computer players have plausibly non-optimal skills. Here's a good summarizing quote: In order to provide an exciting and dynamic game, the AI needs to manipulate the gameplay to create situations that the player can exploit. In ...