Playing complex strategy games for many years, one of the things that irks me the most is that hard AI levels often just give the dumb AI cheats to simulate it being smarter. To me, it’s not very satisfying to go against cheating AI. Are any games today leveraging neural networks to supplant or augment hand-written decision tree based AI? Are any under development? I know AI can be resource intensive, but it seems that at least turn based games could employ it.
I don’t know what it’s using specifically under the hood, but in Street Fighter 6 Capcom recently added a new AI opponent you can fight that they say is trained on actual player ranked matches and fights more like a human opponent. You can even have it try to mimic your own playstyle if you’ve played enough.
It can do some odd things and its mimicry isn’t perfect. But it definitely doesn’t feel like the typical high difficulty CPU opponent which uses things like input reading to react faster than a real player ever could.
…it also has been seen teabagging.
You can train it in mirror matches, but the V Rivals that you can fight other than your own mirror are an amalgamation of a particular rank. There’s a whole lot of skill variance in Master rank alone, so it might be good for training me against Dhalsim, because hardly anyone plays Dhalsim, so no one knows the matchup, but it won’t help me learn how to beat Punk, specifically.
Yeah, there are some disappointing limitations for sure, but it definitely is interesting, and does at least feel more like a human player than the normal CPU opponents.
…if a somewhat schizophrenic one.
I’m not into fighting games, but that’s pretty neat! I hope the industry follows suit if people like how it works in Street Fighter 6.