Word processing, web browsing and the occasional spreadsheet do nothing but leave your machine bored and yawning. If you were to look in on what it's up to while you do the things that 'justified' getting the computer in the first place, you will see that the CPU is sitting idle for well over 75% of the time.
But a good 3D video game is something a computer can really sink it's teeth into, give it a good workout, wake it up and spin it around - [or, choose your own, "I'm-not-bored-anymore" cliche]. It looks like these guys at Splash Damage who are developing a first person shooter called Brink for Bethesda Softworks (distributor of many very high end video games (Fallout 3, Elder scrolls - Oblivion and many others)) have set a pretty high goal for themselves when it comes to the artificial intelligence that will operate the bad guys (and the good guys too!)
According to this story on attack of the fanboy.com They have decided that the behavior of the computer controlled opponents in the game will be indistinguishable from that of a human player.
Wow.
That might not seem like such a big deal and since we've not seen it yet it might be merely braggadocio, but if they are able to deliver on that goal, that will really be something. Something that approaches close to a Turing testable result. As far as I know the Turing test confines itself to language as a way of testing the advancedness of a machine intelligence. (yes, I often use undictionaried words, like advancedness and undictionaried. This is because I've been developing a language of my own for use in an artificial world and I have come to realize how weirdly arbitrary dictionaries are. Besides, I got permission from this really cool, really smart lexicographer chick in a TED talk.)
°°Is this post getting too linky? Too parenthetical? Too parenthetically linky? Too inky, linky, sidewise thinky? °°English needs a mechanism for presenting not only beside (para) + thoughts (thesis) = parenthesis, but it also needs a way to express (meta) above/ outside/ seperate by degree or level or magnitude (thesis) thoughts. English doesn't have one... but I think it should. I think I will use doubled degree symbols and call them metathesis /MEH tuh THEE seez/ to mean a thought that is above the current line of thought as opposed to beside it. They function just like quotation marks or parenthesis currently do, which is to say they surround the text that is to be considered 'meta'. In this case we use the metathesis to set off this thought the author is having about writing while he is writing it and use them in nested fashion to indicate his thoughts about thinking about the writing while he is writing.
Use this mechanism frequently in your written communications and it will catch on (To type a degree sign, hold down the [alt] key on your keyboard and type 0176 on the number pad, then release the alt key). °°°°
I wonder if there is a test equivalent to the Turing Test to determine humanness of an opponent or ally in a game or simluation. It's possible and I believe probable that the very best way to determine if your enemy/ally is a computer is to engage it in some english conversation. Chances are, if it speaks decent english, it's a machine. (I'm joking about that part of course, but have u seen the st8 of what passes for English used by summa deez kids online 2day? English, FTW!) Naturally, we would expect that if our opponent/ally was a machine that his english would be his weak spot. But... uhm... wouldn't that just make him more humanlike?
At any rate, it will be interesting to see what these guys come up with and if they can program the game AI's to have sufficiently bad english skills to pass as human.
-j
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