Comment Work of his more interesting than Creatures. (Score 3) 199
I ran into a few people from his company at the Alife VI Conference in LA in 1998. The Creatures game was part of what they were discussing, but not really. They were really excited about a new contract they had with DERA. (British Defence Evaluation Research Agency, public/private defence contractor org, and home of the Harrier jet)
They had contracted to build more adaptive and intelligent combat flight enemies for the simulations. The pilots were able to predict how the existing rule based systems worked, and were becoming rigid in their own reactions. So they contacted these guys, and they built a system (way less complex than the characters in Creatures) pretty quickly.
The first version that they came out with was incredibly effective, but you'd be unlikely to come across this strategy in a human pilot: barrel roll incessantly, pull up if the enemy is above you, and fire when they're in your sights. Very simple rules, works no matter what the position of the enemy, and would pulp a human pilot. After some tweaking, they ended up with something that more resembled human behavior.
But the first round got them thinking. In a dogfight, maneuverability is key. A plane can handle maybe 15 Gs, a human pilot 8-10 tops. If a fighter plane weren't dependent on the limitations on the human pilot, it would win against a plane having such limitations, *every time*. or nearly. be able to pull sharper turns, more extreme maneuvers, etc.
Based on this, and the way the flight sim was coded (the neural net flying the plane got its inputs from the data that would be available from the actual instruments), they were proceeding with a proposal to put this puppy in a live plane. Haven't heard anything more about it, but I still get the willies when I see the Creatures box in stores.
--Shameless SelfPlug Check out the papers I published on social environments and language origination using multiagent sims.
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/www/u/stoness/
(about halfway down the page
They had contracted to build more adaptive and intelligent combat flight enemies for the simulations. The pilots were able to predict how the existing rule based systems worked, and were becoming rigid in their own reactions. So they contacted these guys, and they built a system (way less complex than the characters in Creatures) pretty quickly.
The first version that they came out with was incredibly effective, but you'd be unlikely to come across this strategy in a human pilot: barrel roll incessantly, pull up if the enemy is above you, and fire when they're in your sights. Very simple rules, works no matter what the position of the enemy, and would pulp a human pilot. After some tweaking, they ended up with something that more resembled human behavior.
But the first round got them thinking. In a dogfight, maneuverability is key. A plane can handle maybe 15 Gs, a human pilot 8-10 tops. If a fighter plane weren't dependent on the limitations on the human pilot, it would win against a plane having such limitations, *every time*. or nearly. be able to pull sharper turns, more extreme maneuvers, etc.
Based on this, and the way the flight sim was coded (the neural net flying the plane got its inputs from the data that would be available from the actual instruments), they were proceeding with a proposal to put this puppy in a live plane. Haven't heard anything more about it, but I still get the willies when I see the Creatures box in stores.
--Shameless SelfPlug Check out the papers I published on social environments and language origination using multiagent sims.
http://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/www/u/stoness/
(about halfway down the page
