The environment has been revamped and is still continuing to grow.
Should have newer photos soon!
Player 2: The Friendly A.I.
Our game is coming together nicely! Despite repeated sickness and general tragedy, our programmers have powered through every road block, and now its up to the artists. Above the model for player 2, the friendly artificial intelligence, is pictured. The thinking for the model is (like everything else in the game) basic shapes. We will be relying on ambient occlusion maps to do most of the heavy lifting, using fairly basic color schemes for visual interest. We will be taking care of all that color dynamically in Unreal 4′s material system. This is convenient because it means we don’t need to generate all but the most basic texture maps for any given model. Aside from the ambient occlusion, we just need to make a color id map which associates pieces of the model with a specific color so that when the model is in the engine, we can tell it to render different pieces with different colors and effects! Its a simple but powerful approach, and one that makes a game of this scale easy for a small group of students to make as opposed to many of our previous projects. We can’t wait to show off what we’ve made in next weeks class playtest!
Isaac – 3d Artist – Team Evil Panda
Paper Prototype Feedback
In order to test our game properly before we began production, we created a paper prototype of our game. It was a two player turn based strategy game where the players needed to work together to stem the flow of our “A.I” (Zac moving the enemies around as he saw fit). We were able to receive some important feedback from our fellow classmates. Most of which was how hard it was, and that we needed to make sure the player always felt like they had a fighting chance against the enemy. Of course, our main goal in making this game is to show people just how impossible it is to beat A.I, it is still important for us to find a happy medium.
Past the prototype, we have made it into the coveted production phase. Our members working around the clock to produce all the aspects of our game. The multiplayer is coming along swimmingly, as well as the individual tasks each player has. Each programmer is working on an their own projects, and it is only a matter of time before we merge all the parts and have a functioning game.
Level-Audio Design
Level Layout:
Most of our game is going to be based around one, top down, city level. As a tower defense, we are focusing on placing lanes leading into the player’s main base. Each lane will be represented by a road running through the city that converge into each other. We chose to place the player above the scene, this will allow for a full strategic view. It will be up the player to create each obstacle with their towers. Leaving for each game to be uniquely different.
Seeing how we are aiming for a multiplayer aspect, we plan are implementing a reverse tower defense of sorts. While one player is placing towers to stop the enemy, the second player is going through an enemy placed tower defense to get to much needed resources. These areas will be placed on the sides of the main area, giving the second player the opportunity to either fight with player one, or go out on their own and gather resources.
Audio Design:
Music is a topic we haven’t placed too much interest in, but we are leaning for a slower, more strategic sound. For the sake of time and skill sets, we’ll do our best to find free music to place into the game. Each different type of shot will have its own sound, and each enemy will be making some sort of sound as well.
The AI Wager
What is an AI?
There are 3 standard definitions of AI, Artificial Narrow Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Artificial Super Intelligence. ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) is surrounding us at almost all times, your phone has hundreds of ANI’s that are absurdly above humans at their chosen tasks. For instance the calculator on your phone is better at computational math then the single best humans on the planet. Not only that, but it understands hundreds of other tasks and handles them with ease. This form of AI is by far the easiest form to create. It can be made with through understanding of the task at hand. However, it is also the single least effective form of AI. It does not truly learn , but only processes data and outputs a result. Yet, the best of these AI’s are incredibly advanced. Siri and Cortana for example are incredibly advanced ANI’s they quickly lea
rn human language and even their owners unique pronunciation. While these AI’s are great at handling our day to day life’s they could never replace a human. No ANI will think creatively or learn a new skill.
AGI’s are not like this. AGI’s will have a general form of intelligence. That is they will know only how to learn. So far this task is proving to be incredibly difficult. The reason for this is linked to the basic concepts behind what intelligence is in the first place. How do we as humans tell that this image is of a cat. It doesn’t truly look like a cat, but somehow our brains are completely capable of looking at a cartoon flat image and deducing that it is a drawing of a cat.
We have tried and our trying several different approaches to reinvent this type of general reasoning skill. The first way is to try and simulate the human brain inside of a computer. This is currently being done by several different groups. The most complex simulations of a brain built by man are currently no smarter than a cat (Footnote 1). While this seems incredibly underwhelming, at our current rate of computational increase said AI is likely to be as smart as a human by 2025.
The next approach is to simulate what created our intelligence in the first place, evolution. This way has one large drawback, its slow. Evolution takes countless iterations in order to develop complexity. We are subverting this weakness slightly by always selecting for intelligence in our current test systems. But even with this path being slow at the moment, by the time 2045 roles around our computers will be fast enough to zip through 2 trillion iterations in less then a day.(Footnote 2)
ASI’s are our ultimate goal. An ASI will be an AGI that is so far above humans in terms of reasoning skills and speed that we would be closer to ants. This can happen in one of 3 
ways. The first is to throw enough processing power at an AGI, that even though it thinks at the same reasoning levels of a human it can out think the whole of humanity. This form of ASI will be substantially less effective then the others, but it is requires less assumtions. The other way to create an ASI is to first create an AGI that is slightly smarter then the humans that created it. Then have it recursivly improve itself, with each iteration being smarter and thus being able to improve itself more, until it vastly surpasses all of human thought. This form of ASI would be the closest thing to a true omniscience that can exist in our physics.(Footnote 3)
The Law of Accelerating Returns
During the last century, humanities rate of information generation and technological advancement has increased at an exponential rate. Many of you will have heard of Moore’s law before. The basic concept is that our computational power doubles every 18 months. So far we have operated at a level slightly above Moore’s Law. Because of this increase in returns we are very likely to have personal computers that have more computational power then all humans put together by 2045.(Footnote 3). This creates a form of inevitability for AI. If even a novice programmer can brute force a problem until an AGI is created, then AGI’s are a guaranteed to happen sometime in the future.
The True Pascal Wager.
Pascal’s Wager is a famous thought experiment about whether to believe in god. It boils down to 4 options either you believe in God and he exists, you believe in God and he does not exist, you don’t believe in God and he exists, and you dont believe in God and he doesn’t exist. Pascal argues that the logical choice is to believe in god, because in all possible options believing in God is equal to or better than not believing in God. There are several issues with this argument biggest of which is choosing which God to believe in out of hundreds. However, the creation of a ASI creates a purer form of Pascal’s Wager. If we make an ASI either it has our values and beliefs and springs the world into utopia, if it doesnt have our beliefs then we will almost certainly become extinct. Else we get nothing.
Choosing what to believe
The obvious choice is of course to make sure that our ASI has our moral system. But which values would you give an AI. The most popular answer when phrased for an AI tends to amount to “maximize human happiness”. However, when you think about what an AI (Fundamentally none human creation) would do to maximize human happiness is convert all organic matter to tiny human DNA based dopamine factories. All intelligence would be removed, everything that humans want and value would be eradicated, and the world would be covered in a happiness goop. Of course nobody wants all life on earth to be converted to tiny dopamine sensors, but an AI with the goal of maximizing happiness might chose that. The best solution is to create an AI that somehow understands what we want and creates it for us. But we have to be careful to not create one that will destroy all of us first.
Our Game
Our game will try to bring awareness to the need to not let a Unfriendly ASI develop. What will happen is it will start om a would already ravaged by an ASI. It will also have a focus on the futility of fighting an ASI even with a different but younger ASI. Because of this the game will be very difficult. We are also making the enemy incredibly smart as compared to standard AI. They will adapt there defense to make your attack weak over time. We will also pepper hints as to potential pit falls when creating an ASI throughout the game.
Footnotes
1. http://www.zdnet.com/article/scientists-build-biggest-artificial-brain-of-all-time-16-billion-neurons-as-smart-as-a-cat/ This is a super computer emulating as many neurons as a cat. It has been shown to learn new behaviors and can be taught basic concepts.
2.http://www.kurzweilai.net/global-futures-2045-ray-kurzweil-immortality-by-2045. By 2045 the abilities of computers will advance to the point of changing the world in an unprecedented way. (Whats more each computer will be able to process more info then the entirety of the human race can).
3. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, pp. 135–136. Penguin Group, 2005. Discussing the likelyhood and power of an AI
Keep An Eye on the Skies
Here is the flying drone we have as a new enemy type. The model is ready to be UV mapped and textured but it is capable of being put into our early build of the game in its current form. More updates soon!
Tower Types
We are currently working on an idea for a our towers that revolves around different forms of damage. Each tower would be made of two different parts, a base that gives the tower its type, and a Top that changes how the tower will actually function.
The addition of several different types of damage also allows us to make our AI “learn” as the game goes on and adapt to the players strategy. By sending enemies that are resistant to impervious to the type of damage most used by the player. At the moment we have 7 different types that we are looking at. Increasing the resistance for one type will decrease the resistance to the other. That added on to the customizable towers will hopefully add an interesting strategy aspect for the player.
Our seven different types are Electric, Physical, Plasma, Hacking, Heat, Chemical, Light.
Electrical resistance weakens security (hacker resistance).
Security (hacker resistance) weakens light resistance.
Light Resistance weakens Physical durability (Physical resistance).
Physical durability weakens thermal (heat) resistance
Thermal resistance weakens chemical resistance
Chemical Resistance weakens Plasma resistance
Plasma Resistance weakens Electrical Resistance.
AI Game
The time has come for the production of a new game with Evil Panda and Dapper Dolphin. We have presented our idea to the class and some had some criticisms and some supported our idea. Though, we are excited to get into production of our game. We have setup our git to pass around the code. We are having weekly meetings. We are ready to build the AI.
First, we are rethinking the rules of the game. Instead of a round based game we are thinking of it being an endless barrage of robots coming the players way. Second, the AI will adapt to what type of tower the player has placed. Third, we have decided to have different types of towers that do different types of damage. As the AI adapts to the player’s towers the player then has to adapt to the AI robots.
Now I as a programmer I would like to talk about networking. I am the programmer who is working on multiplayer/networking. I am using a new engine I have barely used before, Unreal Engine 4. I have been reading documentation or should I say lack of. So I had to search through the source code of the Unreal Engine, but I figured it out. The other programmers and I have decided to go with a dedicated server model. In a dedicated server model the server does not render the game but only does networking important functions. Thus, making the server more efficient. Then the clients connect to the server and they send information about the game back and forth. Jeremy and Zac have created a white box and now I am hooking it up to networking. There are some problems, but I will figure it out.
We are all excited to make this game. So stay tuned to our development on this site.
A New Beginning
There comes a point in every persons life when they need to think long and hard on the implications of Artificial Intelligence, and how one day it will destroy us all. Well, for the many loyal humans in our Alternative Game Development class, that time is now. Because Evil Panda is proud to present our currently unnamed game! We understand how actually having a name is important for these epic moments, and we are hard at work throwing names about! Usually in the forms of named paper airplanes. In a re-imagined Warcraft mod, Evil Panda is asking players the hard questions, are robots going to take over? Players will given towers to place anywhere on the playable map, and use these towers to coral the enemies into a maze of their own destruction. Each enemy destroyed will give the human players more resources to devout to their towers, but that’s not all! We are adding in a second player, who will act as a guard and gatherer. This second player will be able to roam around the maze, aiding these towers in their duties, and gathering more resources to be used by the first player. We already have a simple working model set up, and we are aware of all potential problems. This week we are working towards selling the idea to the class, as well as finalize on all style options, and design opinions. This game will truly test how well prepared we are for the A.I. apocalypse, we’re ready, are you?
New Posts from Inkura!
First level of Inkura in the works!