Java code used in last year's Angry Birds artificial intelligence competition has been released into the wild. The Australian National University's Artificial Intelligence Group last year decided the game would be a fine way of testing just how brainy artificial intelligences have become, because as anyone who's played the …

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Friday 5th April 2013 08:32 GMT Ragarath

Why so long?

Surely this is less AI and more well, physics calculations. (Disclaimer: not looked into it more than this article)

If you know the values of breaking the things on screen and the locations of the required objects (image analysis) then how is this AI? Someone has told it what those values were and it calculates the exact trajectories based on those values.

Or is it trying the level multiple times to see what works and what doesn't? If it is doing this why does the article not mention it?

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1. Friday 5th April 2013 09:45 GMT Brewster's Angle Grinder
  
  We need an "open mouth; insert foot" icon
  
  When faced with the choice of me being dumb or somebody else being dumb, I always chose to assume the other person is dumb and end the algorithm.
  
  (Disclaimer: I've not played angry birds, but the screenshot suggests the targets move. And I'm sure the game wouldn't be addictive if the physics were trivial; it is a puzzle which confounds wetware and so is no doubt hard for computers, too. Finally, I dispute the fact that image recognition isn't AI; a sizeable chunk of your brain is given over to it.)
  
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2. Friday 5th April 2013 11:27 GMT Morten Bjoernsvik
  
  Re: Why so long?
  
  Or is it trying the level multiple times to see what works and what doesn't? If it is doing this why does the article not mention it?
  
  It tries shot after shot and sees how well it goes, sets angle and power and fires away.
  
  This computation they have shortened down from 10sec to 1/10 because they have probably taken away the presentation and go directly onto the physics computation of the impact.
  
  The nice thing is that they do not bend the rules just try and try, although it is not much AI in this because it is easy to compute the successrate for each shot. Try 10 shots then take the one that destroys most objects and go to next shot ets. it is static and not more than 5-6 birds. This is no chess solver like deep blue.
  
  But it is cool and fun to watch.
  
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  1. Friday 5th April 2013 11:39 GMT Morten Bjoernsvik
    
    Re: Why so long?
    
    After installing the code I see it waits 10 sec between each shoot so everything becomes static, that is why it takes so long 10 sec every move, would have been nice this was shortened down. but AI need to be smarter then to shorten, not much brute force then.
    
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3. Friday 5th April 2013 11:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Why so long?
  
  @Ragarath: I think you misunderstand a key aspect of these challenges: they have no special "visibility" into the internal game state. They don't get to read the internal structures that the game maintains, they only get to look at the screen, just like you and I.
  
  I suppose you could try to make a "player" that would inspect the screen, apply image recognition, build up its own model of the various objects internally, run internal simulations, and get it "right" the first try, but then that would break the first time the game logic changed the slightest bit.
  
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Friday 5th April 2013 09:15 GMT fizz

It does also need to compute strategies, decide how to use the different bird powers to help the following birds to accomplish the total goal, essentially it does need to properly rcognize complex causal-chains.

If you think that understanding that if I throw a small bird at that anonymous block instead of at that uncovered pig, I will then open a path to throw the bomb-bird at the base of the pillar that falling will knock out the whole lot of pigs included that protected one that I would have no chance to hit does not involve a good level of AI, I don't know what it does...

Even in nature only very few animals, all considered pretty intelligent, understand the concept of causation at more than few steps of separation.

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Friday 5th April 2013 12:08 GMT Steve 13

@Fizz

"It does also need to compute strategies, decide how to use the different bird powers to help the following birds to accomplish the total goal"

Does it actually do that?

Or does it (from the snippet of debug output that's given) try randomly throwing birds (presumably random birds when there is a choice) and see what the result is, discard ones with no effect, and keep replaying the level using known 'good' shots until random chance results in it stumbling on a winning formula.

The "changing target at random" doesn't sound very much like causal reasoning to me, it sounds like either a depth or breadth first search of all the possible game states, they are just enumerating the game state tree at some sort of defined level of granularity (ie how much it moves the target each time).

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