Malcolm Ryan

Sorry, I've been at work on some other projects. There's a lot of AI research in tracking which might be useful here, but it would require some adaptation. I'm thinking of something like a particle filter. It would track of a collection of possible locations for the player, weighted by likelihood. The weights are updated based on sensing, by increasing weights with positive evidence (sightings, noises) and negative evidence (seeing empty space where the player might have been). It should also be possible to do things like combining the knowledge of different guards and adding evidence from things like open doors or extinguished lamps. Of course, the problem here is not to find the player's location (which we already know) but to simulate the guards' lack of knowledge in a realistic way. I think a scheme like this could give the guards an apparently "rational" way of working out where the player may be. The question then remains of how the guards should use this knowledge, but that will require more thought.

Ick. I hate custom scripting languages. They are almost invariably written by people who have no actual experience in language design and therefore they tend to reproduce all the same bad features over again. Haven't they heard of Python, Ruby or Lua? <sigh> How are you keeping track of where the agents think the player might be? I've done a bit of work on tracking. I've been thinking about how you might go about giving guards a fairly realistic searching behavour, without making them either overly stupid or unenjoyably smart. (The purpose of any enemy AI being to put up a good fight and then lose.) Yes. You work at ANU right? I'll be visiting RSISE next month. Perhaps we can catch up? Drop me an email if you're interested.

I have a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and I currently lecture in Game design at the university of New South Wales.

What's the state of play with regard to the AI for this project? I'm a big fan of stealth games at least in concept, but I've usually found the AI to be disappointing. As it so happens, I am an AI researcher myself, and I've given a fair bit of thought into making better stealth AIs. What is the interface for bot-writing like on this project? If it's reasonable accessible, I might be able to contribute something. Malcolm