Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

As an ex-game dev, I always found it a little annoying that they used "AI" for what was essentially just hard-coded logic.

It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were using symbolic AI to write the first computer-controlled chess games.

Then AI programmers hit the wall of hard-coded logic, went through an AI winter, and what survived on the other end was logic that was automatically trained from big data sets. We used to call that "machine learning" because "AI" had connotations of snake oil from previous AI winters. But then within the past decade, tech companies with grandiose ambitions decided that "machine learning" was too nerdy so resurrected "AI" to refer to LLMs and their ilk.

The term is just a muddled mess.

LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded".

I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.

> LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded".

I disagree. Hardcoded means you need to change and recompile the entire program. So neither an .env file nor model weights that are loaded at runtime are 'hardcoded'.

But you can use hardcoded while referring to interpreted languages as well, it's a bit of a difficult term. I feel it's more about repeatability when non of the input changes.

I would define it more broadly, "same input == same output, with the same program" and using that definition all computer programs are hardcoded in the end.

There is a gray area, you can consider that even programs that use random() are in the hardcoded category as with the same (semi)random value they will produce the same output. You just need to think of the random value as input, since not all input needs to be user input.

Sure, and the article mentions the AI in elden ring is scripted in lua which is loaded at runtime, meaning it's not hardcoded.

There's no reasonable definition of "hard-coded" that fits how LLMs are made.

The whole idea behind "hard-coded" and original symbolic AI was that a skilled human deliberately wrote explicit code to define a program's behavior.

Machine learning is the exact opposite of that approach.

NPC behaviour has always been described as AI though, even before the AI as we know it now was even invented. AI is a very general umbrella term being repurposed to describe LLMs.

  AI - artificial intelligence

The "artificial" can have several meanings. It seems a lot of folks interpret it as "man-made but identical" however I usually try to interpret it as "not sincere", "fake" or "a replication of". If you use the term that way it will fit a lot nicer into your understanding of AI in games, frankly also AI as in LLM's. In the way that it is not actually intelligent it is mimicking intelligence.

Just by using the term "AI" I feel like you are indicating that it is not actually intelligence, otherwise you would call it intelligence instead. Therefore using hard-coded logic to fake behavioral patterns makes perfect sense.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/artifici...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com