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Design / 7DRL Idea - Plugin AI
« on: March 04, 2014, 09:01:40 PM »
Every so often someone proposes the idea of an AI which is trained with a genetic algorithm (GA), often with some sort of artificial neural network (ANN). There are a myriad of other ideas for AI that are also worth checking out. I personally do not think the GA/ANN idea sounds very robust in general (compared to a good developer designed AI that is), but would be an interesting experiment which you could then point to whenever someone proposes the idea again.
To facilitate AI experimentation, my idea for the upcoming 7DRL challenge is to implement a bare-bones roguelike with the AI run as a separate executable plugin. There would be a simple text-based protocol run similar to how many AI contest are run. As an example of what I mean, see http://ants.aichallenge.org/specification.php (not that this is a great example, its just one that came to mind first). Basically the game would run the AI as a subprocess and send and receive information via the AI stdin/stdout. Hopefully such a protocol combined with a simple roguelike game would mean that the barrier to entry in writing the AI would be fairly low. You could also make the hero AI a plugin so that training is more easily accomplished.
My hope is that such a 7DRL would be interesting to other devs as a playground for AI experiments. My question is whether or not there would be interest from other developers in contributing AI plugins during the 7DRL challenge. If so, I would love to try this idea out. If not...well I've got a long list of more interesting game ideas I could do.
To facilitate AI experimentation, my idea for the upcoming 7DRL challenge is to implement a bare-bones roguelike with the AI run as a separate executable plugin. There would be a simple text-based protocol run similar to how many AI contest are run. As an example of what I mean, see http://ants.aichallenge.org/specification.php (not that this is a great example, its just one that came to mind first). Basically the game would run the AI as a subprocess and send and receive information via the AI stdin/stdout. Hopefully such a protocol combined with a simple roguelike game would mean that the barrier to entry in writing the AI would be fairly low. You could also make the hero AI a plugin so that training is more easily accomplished.
My hope is that such a 7DRL would be interesting to other devs as a playground for AI experiments. My question is whether or not there would be interest from other developers in contributing AI plugins during the 7DRL challenge. If so, I would love to try this idea out. If not...well I've got a long list of more interesting game ideas I could do.
