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Comment by neiman | Hacker News Reader

They probably would, but the creative players would suffer from it. AI never predicts creativity.

I am now imagining a (probably short) story in which the AI does learn to predict players perfectly, even the creative ones, and ends with a gamer taking his hands off the controller and allowing the AI to play exactly as he would have and wondering what was ever the point.

I think prediction failures are more likely to punish the opponents of the unpredictable guy. In a lot of online shooters, people with 300ms+ ping blink around unpredictably and appear to suddenly murder you out of nowhere, but they don't seem to have any trouble themselves.

No offense but I think you underestimate the predictive potential of millions of hours of game state

None taken. But your claim is that creativity is not possible anymore, since it was all done in the "millions of hours of game state". However, if creativity is possible, then my argument is correct.

Another issue is that machine learning/AI don't predict rare events, like earth quakes. So even with all the knowledge in the world, it won't predict a rare creative move of a player.

But every event, creative or otherwise, is made up of hundreds of smaller events. That complicated wall jump - 360 kill you just did used several input signals. Even if the server side AI can't predict the exact final outcome, it can definitely help with the intermediate, well known states for at least some of the input systems.

I say some but I do believe a large enough volume of data can improve the performance of this class of input/states.

Yes, and then you predict something, broadcast it to your clients, and it ends up being wrong so the clients have to roll back. Would not be a good experience.

Perhaps if you train the model on the existing movement and action history of the particular player

Oh, that's a great idea!

Stadia could sell it as an add-on to players which not only don't want to play their games themselves, but also aren't satisfied by watching other people play through their games on YouTube or Twitch. With this add-on, they can finally watch themselves play through their games, without having to lift a finger to, you know, actually play!

They would make a killing on Twitch, where a streamer could just buy someone else's training data and use that instead of playing themselves.

Black market dealers would swap Terabytes of hot RAM with manually inputted data from the best e-sport players in the world. Corporate enforcers would hack those dealers to delete the data.

Call it Sonic Mnemonic.

I thought about it. But first, you need a lot of information to train a model, so it would only work for very heavy players. Second, creativity is not defined only as doing an action that others didn't do (often or never) before, but also of doing an action that you didn't do (often or never) before.

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