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From: David Samuel Myers <dmyers@ic.sunysb.edu>
Subject: Re: AI in IF
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Martin Bays <martinbays@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 	- In a piece of IF, the world and events within it are very clearly
> defined, allowing our AI to bypass the more difficult, low-level
> perception (vision, speech recognition etc.) that have proved to be
> huge problems for real world AI. And yet we still have a scope, a
> broadness of world and possibility, which is very similar to that of
> the real world. Which means, I think, that this is our best chance to
> agents which act in a realistic nature in realistic situations without
> having to explore the depths of information-processing.

And there's the rub, too. While there *are* world models built into IF,
they are still not explicit enough to deal with the complex modeling that
will be necessary to be as simulationist as you want. When you talk about
human interactions, you're getting ahead of this thorny representation
issue. Witness how much work it was to do a small bit of physical
simulationism in Metamorphoses. Our capability to represent and wrangle
the kind of information needed to show the depth you crave is still a ways
off. Refer to the Erasmatron and www.robotwisdom.com for proposals
concerning how this is going to happen. But realize that the "man behind
the curtain" approach, misdirecting the player into thinking the world is
more responsively simulated than it is (rather than just
author-anticipated) ... this approach is going to be with us a while
longer. NPCs as intelligent agents is a real hard problem. If you decide
to move along with this, much luck.

-d
