By Stuart Fox Posted 09.10.2009 at 12:57 pm 9 Comments

Unreal Tournament via Art-Battle

When first-person-shooter video games first hit the market, the computer-controlled bot characters that were deployed in multiplayer matches to fill out the ranks ran around like the Keystone Cops. Now, the bots do a bit better, but not nearly good enough for the people behind the BotPrize.

BotPrize, a twist on the famous Turing test of artificial intelligence, offers $6,000 to the first team to create a bot that 80 percent of the judges can't distinguish from a player. This year's competition, featuring competitors from Japan, Spain, England, the US, Canada, Italy, and Brazil, wrapped up today, and no one managed to win the grand prize. The most successful bot programmer did walk off with $1,700.

The game used for the competition was Unreal Tournament 2004, but the judges created new weapons for the competition to throw in a little extra challenge for the entrants.

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Tags

Entertainment & Gaming, Stuart Fox, artificial intelligence, first person shooter, games, science news, VIDEO GAMES
The challenge of the competition stems from the imperfections inherent in all people. It would be easy to program a bot to play perfectly, always hitting its target and quickly finding the best power-ups. Instead, the eventual BotPrize winner will need to show a curve for adaptation, occasionally make mistakes, and talk trash like a real player.

"You want to build an emotional model for the agent you're competing with," said Will Wright, creator of The Sims. "It's not just about having an accurate aim. It's about creating a bot that simulates a victory dance above your dead corpse."

So far, no one has ever won the main prize; even the most advanced bots are either technically perfect or worse than a bumbling n00b. Of course, if players human players are still as petty, annoying, and cheap as they were during my freshman days playing Quake III, maybe it's for the best that the bots don't perfectly imitate people.

See if you can spot which is the human player and which the bot:

[via Technology Review]

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9 Comments

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TechnoFreakFace
09/10/09 at 6:40 pm

this will all come together in several years, would be nice to incorparate this idea:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-08/evolving-robots-learn-lie-hide-resources-each-other
to this gaming aprouch

ahhhh gaming nirvana XD

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crystallover
09/10/09 at 9:59 pm

"no one has ever won the main prize; even the most advanced bots are either technically perfect or worse than a bumbling n00b."that make sense.
http://www.crazypurchase.com/cheap-jewelry-wholesale-18

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tdave
09/10/09 at 10:58 pm

I think player x is the bot,well both are too perfect to be a "bot".

http://hardwareonthespot.blogspot.com/

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meyaht
09/11/09 at 7:56 am

how can you be too perfect to be a bot? if you crank the AI up on counter strike source it is very difficult to win against a bot, since they map the most efficient path to use with the best weapon, adjust perfectly for recoil, and can snap-shoot better then almost everyone. not to mention that the bots "know" where you are even across the map and will always come right for you, or wait for you in a place that you will soon be.

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Neuuubeh
09/13/09 at 2:32 am

Well both the player and the bot in that vid seem to be trying to play Unreal Tournament quake-style.. LEARN SOME PROPER MOVEMENT dammit :D. The human player is deliberately jumping around like a moron, real players never do that, dodging off walls etc is a real easy way to discern human from bot - bots dont do it.

Meyaht, you've obviosly never played Unreal Tournament. Yes, bots can be too perfect in this game. The game balance is a lot more different than Counterstrike (and in my personal opinion, waaay more complex)

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GolfandSports
09/16/09 at 6:17 am

Thanks for the huge information, actually I don't know about this. Thanks for add some more useful stuff in my mind vocabulary.

http://www.golfandsports.com/

link to this comment
Sonicman10
09/16/09 at 9:31 am

This could be quite the advance in gaming.-DaSonicMan

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Jazzcat
11/12/09 at 7:44 pm

NAH, you know that it's a little too human, when it jumps out of a corner letting out a massive pig squeal, then slamming a gravity hammer into your corpse repeatedly and screaming, "YAH, BITCH, YAH!!!!"

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394216002
11/17/09 at 11:30 am

this is a sweet game the graphics are the best out of the games and its hard to predict the computers.

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