back to article AI game bot HUNTS DOWN ENEMIES, passes Turing Test

A gaming bot has passed the Turing Test for the first time ever by successfully mimicking the traits of human gamers including irrational grudges and poor aim over long distance. The University of Texas computer scientists behind winning game bot UT^2 – one of the two champions of the BotPrize 2012 competition – coded it to …

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  1. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Happy

    Apply the same test to politicians. I bet the results are well below 50%.

  2. Bumpy Cat
    Terminator

    Is it a bad sign ...

    ... that to make a killbot more human, they had to reduce the efficiency of killing? I think I need to invest more in my Robot Apocalypse bunker ...

    1. Omgwtfbbqtime
      Devil

      Re: Is it a bad sign ...

      Yep,

      now just evolve it like that - then remove the constraints and see what happens.

    2. h4rm0ny

      Re: Is it a bad sign ...

      You have no idea just how lethal a robot killing machine could be. Seriously. There's a mosquito killing device built by a private company (Intellectual Ventures, I have no affiliation) that simply targets them with a camera and zaps them dead with a laser right out of the air. And it does it fast as well. Really fast. You can just turn it on and the poor things just start falling out of the air. It can even tell the difference between types of insect. Now imagine the precision applied to a robot. It could either swap the laser for a gun (imagine something equivalent to a skilled sniper with a powerful rifle that can target and shoot in less than a second and keep doing this every second for as long as you like) or it could keep the laser and just be taught to shoot at people's eyes (contravening international agreements, but the USA and Israel are no strangers to that).

      Yes - you'd better invest more in your Robot Apocalypse bunker. The technology on this sort of thing is now pretty much here. It just hasn't really been made cost-effective / reliable enough for the militaries yet. But it will be.

      1. TeeCee Gold badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Is it a bad sign ...

        Too damned right. Always makes me laugh when yer SF-movie hero knocks out half a dozen lasers in a corridor or room by diving and firing, while the automated defense systems repeatedly miss him.

        If it were real life, he'd be doing a passable impression of a colander before he got to think about the first trigger pull. We already have automated guns (rather slower than lasers, so hitting a moving target is harder) that can turn targets moving at supersonic speeds in their field of fire into swiss cheese pretty much instantaneously.

      2. Yag
        Terminator

        mosquito killing device (...) zaps them dead with a laser.

        Must.... get.... one...

        Too bad they probably don't use visible light laser...

      3. Evil Auditor Silver badge

        Re: Is it a bad sign ...

        @h4rm0ny: Lasers are already on duty. Their main task may be measuring or target marking but they work just as well in blinding enemies. Not on robots though for that would be against some convention since their main task must not be blinding... What already exists are robot guns. They record the trajectory of a projectile, calculate its origin and fire back. Very quickly, much quicker than you can say 'fuck, it's a robot!'. Not sure though whether such things have been deployed to battle grounds already.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is it a bad sign ...

        It just hasn't really been made cost-effective / reliable enough for the militaries yet. But it will be.

        Not Enough Pork to go around Every Year is what the weasel-words like "cost-effective" and "reliable" means in the military context!

      5. Ross K Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: Is it a bad sign ...

        There's a mosquito killing device built by a private company (Intellectual Ventures, I have no affiliation) that simply targets them with a camera and zaps them dead with a laser right out of the air. And it does it fast as well. Really fast. You can just turn it on and the poor things just start falling out of the air.

        Poor things? I've been eaten alive by the little bastards this year. No sympathy here...

        How much does one of these mozzie zappers cost and where can I get one?

        1. Irony Deficient

          I’ve been down since I began to crawl …

          Ross K, you can get one from your shed if you’re ready, willing, and able to invest some blood, tears, toil, sweat, and a few k£. Its cost will depend upon the components that you choose to use.

          http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/backyard-star-wars/0

    3. I think so I am?
      Terminator

      Re: Is it a bad sign ...

      They should of just made a super bot that just annihilated everyone and trash talked the whole game.

      "Everyone would of bitched he was modding"

      And to be fair, some people who play 1st persons are like robots!

  3. frank ly

    But ....

    .... did it lie about its score while chatting in a forum afterwards?

    1. Thomas 4

      Re: But ....

      Nope, but it's got teabagging down to a fine art now, and its vocabulary now encompasses every racial, sexual and grossly offensive slur known to humankind.

  4. Graham Marsden
    Terminator

    Afterwards...

    ... did it say "By your command!"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Afterwards...

      Or did it say "Exterminate!"

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does it reply with "I ain't a bot I'm jus betta than you noobs, it's skillz!!!!"

    Whenever anyone accuses it of being a bot?

    1. TRT Silver badge
      Devil

      Does it reply with "I ain't a bot I'm jus betta than you noobs, it's skillz!!!!"

      Nope. It was far too good a human-sim to make the mistake of including all those correctly placed apostrophes.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Does it reply with "I ain't a bot I'm jus betta than you noobs, it's skillz!!!!"

        And I tried really hard to type like a brain-dead botter as well...

        It's not easy being that much of a loser.

        :)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Does it reply with "I ain't a bot I'm jus betta than you noobs, it's skillz!!!!"

          You're better at it than you think.

  6. Aaron Em

    I for one

    &c., &c.

  7. TRT Silver badge
    Terminator

    I now need to code...

    UTK9, an AI dog which will bark at non-human bots before they get into the base and start wasting all the humans. They'll be back.

  8. Simon Harris
    Terminator

    AI game bot HUNTS DOWN ENEMIES...

    ... Sarah Connor hunts down game bot designers.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    In games like in real life

    you don't need to show much in terms of intelligent behavior in order to kill fellow human beings. Especially when you have guns.

    1. Dave Bell

      Re: In games like in real life

      It was back in the days of LAN Parties, late last century, when I was watching one of the multi-player combat games of the time: some sort of urban Eastern Front game. It was at a wargames convention and then I saw somebody I knew coming up to the computers, with some of his friends.

      I knew he had been in the Army. And I recognised what they did: things like fire and movement, stuff straight out of the training manuals. They worked as a team, while everyone else seemed to be loners.

      I wonder how they'd look to the people who judged this competition.

      1. F111F
        Thumb Up

        Re: In games like in real life

        A few years ago, when my teenage son and his friends started playing games like COD, I tried to explain the "team" concept and it was like talking to stunned mullet...then they learned that kicking serious butt as a team was way more fun than just running around shooting anything that moves (or doesn't). They learned to provide cover fire, securing the high ground, setting ambushes, etc. Sure, every now and then they reverted to type (especially late at night), but that's only to be expected. At least now they are fully trained for the zombie apocalypse.

      2. Charles 9

        Re: In games like in real life

        You can usually recognize well-oiled teams straight off, and these are the kinds of teams you usually find at high-level competition. That said, perhaps that'll be one of the next steps in evolving Bot AI: a group of them acting like a realistic team: to the extent that they're also capable of improvisation as the situation arises. It would be an interesting angle to pursue.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    RoTM, Shirley ?

    Checklist for AI-geddon:

    1) software that can tenaciously pursue a human (tick);

    2) artificial constructs that can *appear* to be human (tick);

    3) time travel such that a combination of (1) and (2) ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT STOP (pending, check with CERN team about progress with LHC on this).

  11. JohnathonZaro
    Mushroom

    "Eat my primitive projectile! Eat it!"

  12. Robert E A Harvey
    Unhappy

    Depressing

    The narrower the subject matter, the easier it is to pass the test. Limiting case: it is very hard to decide if a human or a machine is solving 3+3.

    But it is depressing that our Turing candidate is being assessed on it's Genocidal abilities, rather than - say - playwriting or portraiture

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Re: Depressing

      What if you expand that to art in general? I'm sure the world would have been a better place with an additional artist instead of a leader with a genocidal dispostion.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Depressing

        At least genocidal maniacs of the past had the decency to be human so you could get rid of them. Not any more.

    2. fhyndoh
      Devil

      Re: Depressing

      nah. telling whether it's a fleshie or a cold metalic overlord is dead simple. ask it to ad 3+3 a thousand times. if it tells you to f**k off it's flesh. If it takes under a second...machine.

      i for one welcome our innacurate bot overlords...

  13. Ian Bremner
    Terminator

    Make it even more human like

    have the bot tea-bag downed opponents and sxreech obscenities in a girlie voice over the chat

  14. HMB

    KHAN!!!!....

    "When humans have a grudge, they'll chase after an enemy even when it's not in their interests."

    Khan, I'm laughing at the superior intellect.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Optional

    The key word is optimal, people don't act in an optimal manner (it's why the army has to train them after all). It's interesting that they are most probably making more complex bots in order to achieve ever simpler behaviour. Still it might go some way to helping with economics and forecasting if we have a better way of modeling non-rational/non-optimal behaviour.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    incredible blood lust

    the machine really needs to feel the fun and joy of killing its in game enemy.

  17. Eddy Ito

    Naturally

    "Hey we've got this new AI tech, what should we teach it first?"

    Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Naturally

      BOFH.

  18. Spider
    Alert

    NRA to DEFCON wolfenstein

    another step in killbots mission objectives to pass for fleshy meatsacks.

    you cannot say we weren't warned.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "We can mimic that behavior"

    That's not the same, at least in my mind, as a human being having and irrational response to a situation. Stress from a billion influences can set us off on a irrational path, a bad day at work, the washing up left in the sink, finding your partners undies on the bathroom floor, etc!

    However I do welcome better and more flexible bots in FPS, so this can only lead to better things.

    1. bharq

      Re: "We can mimic that behavior"

      The definition of AI is not the imitation of intelligence, but the imitation of intelligent behaviour. So yes, it is perfectly adequate in this context.

  20. Richard Wharram
    Mushroom

    Teach it to play a decent game

    There is only one UT. The original. All else is a heresy.

    <- Redeemer.

    1. adam payne

      Re: Teach it to play a decent game

      +1 to you sir!

    2. phr0g
      Thumb Up

      Re: Teach it to play a decent game

      It was good, but I was heavily addicted to Quake2 at the time. Even installed ISDN to get a better ping.

      But realistic bots is a fantastic step forward. How shite was Quake3 Arena offline?

  21. Tempest8008

    I wonder what the rate was for detecting the real humans?

    There had to be some false positives.

  22. DanceMan
    Unhappy

    Make a bot that can be easily fooled into voting against its own self-interest and it will truly mimic human behaviour. Alas.

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just another reason to avoid having a World War

    When AI Machines are used to wage war, it will be the end of humanity as we know it.

    Simply looking at all the Science Fiction stories/movies on the subject will tell you that we don't have a chance. SF has a great track record of foreshadowing the future.

    Mark my words, this is coming to a theater of war near you soon and there will be no stopping it.

    The remote piloted drones are bad enough, allow them to "think for themselves" and it will get very bad, fast. Putting AI in armored vehicles will be even worse. Try http://iislands.com/hermit/bolo.html for a start.

    Yes, these are "stories" about self aware war machines but all the technology is already in place at this time to create them and all that is required is a large scale war for these devices to become reality.

  24. The Grump
    Pint

    I, for one, plan to be too drunk to notice as the killing machines put enough holes in me to fill the Albert Hall. Me? Sit in a hole in the ground with expired shelf life MRE's, a chemical toilet, and a sleeping bag ? Not the way I want to go out. If AI-mageddon happens, no one can stop it. Might as well enjoy that last call for drinks, before the bars close - forever.

    Bartender, another pint and a bag of peanuts, please.

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