In my thesis, I worked through the architecture of game engines and propsed a new architecutre, based on functional thougts and the devide-and-conquer paradigm. Telesto, my game engine I’m currently working on is influenced by this thoughts (although I must admit that implementing the first AI modules into Telesto is about to change half of its architecture again. A neverending story!)

Enjoy!

As promised, the slides can be found in the download section, Enjoy!

//edit: The gamesday vids – in german – can be found here.

If you want to take a look at the slides or the video recording, it’s both up now on the
Winter Games University 2011 page.

See You next time!

We will require more advanced tools to digest the tsunami of information for us. And that’s where AIs will jump in. Don’t get me wrong! I’m not talking about Terminators or Data, although both would be cool (would personally prefer the later). The AI systems we might encounter in this century will probably be automated information processors, identifying important information, constructing semantic links and building up meta-information and relations between different information pools.
Sounds familiar? Yep, I wouldn’t be surprised if we would encounter the first advanced AIs in web search engines or similar fields of appliance. But let’s take it one step further. Consider we would be able to build hardware to mimic the capabilities of human brains, so we would be able to build a machine to run an AI with the same capabilities as our own intelligence. Would that be the promised human-level AI?

Probably not. We would be quite disappointed or feared of our results. The moment the AI begins to live – or “is turned on” – it is floating in complete emptiness. No sensor input, no entities to interact, no perception of time, nothing. Such a system would never evolve to something even close to the word “intelligence”. Okay so let’s solve this minor problem by adding sensor information. In the most simple case an API or perhaps even a communication console. Later on even webcams and whatnot. At this point we are leaving the field of hard science (if we ever were there with this thoughts in the first place) and are diving into the world of “what-if”. Could an artificial, thinking (as we use the term “thinking” for us humans) system evolve in a human-like intelligence?

That’s a question for social science rather than AI development. A human “parent” developing a freshly formatted AI would not threat the AI like he or she would threat a human child – or even her or his own child. The AI would grow up in a rather hostile environment. Human “parents” would have their vacations, turning the poor AI off for two weeks. They wouldn’t care for all of the AIs needs – like attention during dinner time or at night. Stuff the AI finds interest in might be classified as a bug and removed, if they are byond the targeted field of appliance…

There are numerous examples in human education, for example twins, which develop highly different characters depending on their social environment, how much they are liked and feel part of a community or if they feel used, unwanted or – one of the most miserable states for us humans – useless. Even perfect human clones would end up being two very different personalities, as one will always – intentionally or not – be favored by its parents.

So, for an AI to develop into a “healthy” and human-like personality, we would probably need “healthy” and human-like AIs as parents or social background. Emotional intelligence – like we developed on earth – can’t exist alone, without social backup – that’s at least my believe. An artificially constructed AI could end up being a rather psychopathic personality. Our intelligence evolved in a long time, something which seems to be rather hard to skip with speeded up development. Give them their time, and they will evolve into our first “aliens”.

Or hopefully not.

Yep, today’s post was rather crazy, but that’s why it’s called brain dump!

I put a small portal together to mange upcoming events. It’s missing a lot of eye candy, but should serve its purpose. More information should arrive in the next days.
Game Universities

Winter Games University 2011

//Edit:
Its up again: gamesday.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de

My topic was the development of a commercial-scale game engine architecture for real time strategy games with MMO gameplay components. Will tell you more in the future. For now, I prepared a small subpage containing my presentation (in German). Enjoy!

Telesto

For those of you who missed the event, or who want to read through the slides again, you may now find the stream and Slides for download on the SGU Subpage .

SGU Subpage

Downloads