Taking a break from reality is a necessary stress reliever. Artificial Intelligence is breaking through that department next, one user experience at a time. Below is a list of the most interesting games and experiments in artificial intelligence.
A whole new market for phones. Developers have created the Giorgio Cam, an AI camera that allows the user to take photos from the real world and makes music from them. It attempts to recognize what it sees on screen and create a clever rap song about it with lyrics. It may just be for fun, but it shows how far AI has come on simple phone apps alone, and how it’s going to expand into bigger devices.
Sims City: An ancient legend. This simulated building game took off in its launch in 1989, giving you the freedom to buy land and construct residences and buildings, all while keeping the needs of the AI city dwellers content. It broke the gaming industry with its complex, life simulation, providing a realism to their reactions, actions, and activities the ‘Sim’ will get into.
A closer look at the Halo series. An entirely first-person shooter released in 2001, the Halo franchise opened the eyes to the AI enemy proficiency. They now began to use objects for cover in a firefight, and respond to gunshots and grenades, occasionally tossing one back towards you that you’ve thrown their way. They also integrated the ‘squad pack’ mentality, enemies now abandoning the fights if their leader has died. Characters that are in your squad now remarked aloud to you if you’re bothering them in some way, and have a ‘behavior tree’ to allow for real responses in the game.
Striking fear in the new age. 2005 brought on the further development of AI enemies, the game F.E.A.R using a coded planner to create unique behaviors in relation to the situation at hand. It brought in the mainstream attacker responses, giving the AI more realistic play and advanced adversary intelligence and quicktime reactions to how you play. It was one of the first games to incorporate this new gameplay and kept gamers on their toes.
Bringing out emotions in The Last of Us. The 2013 horror, zombie, survival mashup took the world by storm. With advanced motion capture suits to give realistic facial expressions and reactions, to thousands of pages of dialogue, The Last of Us integrated a companion AI system that reacted to your choices and gameplay, emotional responses, and even had her own personal dialogue hidden throughout the game. The developer himself created the AI mechanic from scratch, allowing for a more rounded and real experience.
The ultimate form of interactive horror. Playable Teaser, or P.T as it’s known in the gaming community, was one of the first horror games to really pull you into the experience and psychology of a house that changes with your play style. Walls and pictures react to your presence, things materialize from thin air if you look that direction too long, and antagonists that only pop up when you least expect it, or are playing timidly. It was the first self-learning enemy to change her tactics every time you popped into the game, and learned from you as you shake your way through the house. P.T was an achievement of gaming and the use of clever, self-learning AI.
Video games and fun experiments have grown in quality and quantity since the introduction of AI. Games come in diverse genres and require different algorithms for programming. It really gives a whole new, well rounded, and immersive experience, furthering the quest for self-taught systems.
