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Comment by lawlessone | Hacker News Reader

Funnily game AI is often smoke and mirrors. devs often have really dumb down the game AI to be fair to the players. And they balance out the dumbing down by giving it bonuses.

example: game AI's often have unlimited ammo. But their bullets don't hurt the player much.

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Depends on the game.

First-person shooter? You're certainly correct. No reason AI can't get headshots 100% of the time and have zero reaction time to the player coming into view.

Strategy games like Civilization? On hard difficulties, it's well-known that AI cheats. Probably because developing AI for a strategy game is pretty damn hard.

Yeah, these games are usually complex enough that creating a bullseye expert system AI for it is very difficult if not impossible. Chris Crawford was already talking about artificially boosting an AI player because of the inevitable skill gap between a fair AI player vs. an actual human in 1982, I remember reading an article about the AI of Eastern Front 1941 for the Atari 800, I'm sure it's not this one from Byte Magazine but it shows similar ideas: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-12/page/n97/m...

It’s almost like ‘artificial intelligence’ is the simulation of intelligence using artifice.

Do people just gloss over the ‘artificial’ part of ‘AI’?

I think most people read it as artificially created intelligence, not faked intelligence.

I don’t understand the distinction. Doesn’t artificiality imply both ‘fakeness’ as well as ‘being man made’?

Artificial flavorings are both. Artificial limbs are both. Artificial turf is both. Artificial intelligence is faked, manufactured intelligence.

Look at the sibling comment to your own: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37848768

That's describing faked intelligence, not artificially created (actual) intelligence. It's using cheats that kinda look like intelligence if you don't know what's really going on.

Artificial turf is actually a good example itself - it's plastic (or other materials), it's fake grass. Artificially created grass would be more like https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/genetically-mo...

Quick edit with another example using terms we already have: An android is a fake human, while a clone is an artificially created human.

no, see, that's my point: you wouldn't call genetically modified grass 'artificial grass'. As you did, you have to qualify it as 'artificially created'. Because apart from being 'artificially created' it's real grass. Likewise your clone is a real human.

So 'artificially created' things are not automatically 'artificial'. They're only 'artificial' if the artifice is still apparent in the end result. If they aren't real.

So my point: if we're describing something as 'artificial' intelligence, we should expect it to be a fake substitute for real intelligence, that has been manufactured to serve that purpose.

If you said you had 'artificially created intelligence', that is a different - and much bigger - claim than that you have 'created artificial intelligence'. Much like if you said you had 'artificially created life' that is a much bigger claim than that you have 'created artificial life'.

> So my point: if we're describing something as 'artificial' intelligence, we should expect it to be a fake substitute for real intelligence, that has been manufactured to serve that purpose.

And my point is that I don't think most people are reading it that way. We're in a hype cycle where people are treating it like true general AI, like you'd see in sci-fi, instead of what it is: fake/simulated intelligence.

I think you're putting too much weight on the components of a term, instead of seeing the term as a whole.

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