AI in Video Games

AI in Gaming

Artificial Intelligence in video games is related to reactive AI and focuses on video game developers creating elements in games that react and change depending on the choices different players make. One example of this is in Flappy Bird, a mobile game that was so popular that the creator removed it from the app store. The artificial intelligence in this game  was constantly changing and evolving. It changed the difficulty of each level based on how many people reached that particular part of the game. 

Games like Space Invaders helped push artificial intelligence into the mainstream. Despite AI's early success in the videogame industry, it was mostly basic algorithms and was only considered AI because of how smart the applications of it were. Space Invaders released in 1978 and AI has been improving since then. However, AI can be overused and can be too intelligent. For instance, depending on how it's implemented, it can be difficult for video game makers to code AI in a way that makes the games fair but still challenging.

AI in video games is now also being used as a tool that learns from itself in order to get smarter. Many video games use AI to learn from the player in order to later use the player’s actions to beat them, or just to interact with the player in the most fun way possible. However, games like Snake for example are video games that the AI learns for itself how to beat a game similarly to how a human would. By using Generational Neural Networks, which are algorithms that give a series of options for the AI to choose that are tested through multiple generations of the program, the AI can learn which options work best in order to get better results. Eventually an AI can teach itself how to beat a game like Snake every time, and this is what we saw in Chess as well. Therefore video games serve as a teaching tool for AI as to how humans' minds progress in a video game as well which can help them to solve problems in real life.