The Quake III Arena Bot(researchgate.net) |
The Quake III Arena Bot(researchgate.net) |
Spiterbot was a notorious one. It was capable of strafejumping, rocketjumping, zone denial, pickup timing, risk/reward behavior, enemy power estimates, and all things you would expect from a competent human player. Things like pro-q3dm6 bridge-to-railgun jump weren't a problem for it. It was still too easy to read for a good player, and susceptible to mistakes leading to HP/armor starvation, like avoiding the railgun control line like plague where a human would have tried to outsmart an enemy, risked it, or waited for an enemy mistake. Too bad there never was a technical write-up for the Spiterbot like this one.
(also, the article is from 2001, this should probably be in the title)
Unvanquished (https://unvanquished.net) became the new "Tremulous" (different engine, etc.), also has bots.
Read more about it here: https://wiki.unvanquished.net/wiki/Bot_design
- navigation, which is done with a combination of A* or Dijkstra and navmeshes
- decision, which is done with the paradigm of behavior trees
- computer vision, to complete what navmeshes can not provide
Despite the term "computer vision", it is still not AI.
I will quote the "Navigation" and "Computer vision" section from the site I linked above:
> All bots should be able to reach any part of the map that does not require special training.
> Bots should be able to detect any enemy in their FoV. It would be nice to have bots not being too good at finding hidden buildables on the roof. This makes hiding eggs unfun and next to impossible in the current state. Unless they are placed outside of a navmesh, in which case bots are totally unable to discover them.
There is a pull request that implements the use of "beacons" for bots which is used to locate buildables: https://github.com/Unvanquished/Unvanquished/pull/2683
There was no "computer vision" in the Tremulous bots, FWIW.
In Tremulous, they used waypoints only, so has nothing to do with AI either.
Bots in Unvanquished are quite human-like and there are plans to add personalities (if they did not add them already) and there is no AI there either.
TL;DR: You can have bots that work quite damn well and human-like without AI/ML.
I mean... do you consider an IRC bot AI? "It is a bot, therefore it is AI" seems wrong to me.
Close tab.
No AI required whatsoever!
The original claim was "Bots are AI, always have been". I gave counterexamples: IRC bots, web crawlers, Quake bots. None of these involve intelligence, they're deterministic programs following explicit rules.
Your "game physics" analogy is also weak. Physics simulation approximates real physical laws. Calling it "physics" makes sense, it's modeling physics. But pathfinding algorithms and decision trees aren't modeling intelligence; they're just conditional logic. That doesn't make it accurate or correct, just conventional.
We need to stop calling things that aren't AI, AI, especially today.