Anyone else care to contribute an example of their emergent behaviours? IIRC, Timkin, I remember reading a post of yours having to due with corners in mazes. Care to re-cap for those who may have missed it?

Will

Quote:Original post by Timkin
I was referring to your most recent response to an AP, in which you made sarcastic remarks about a lack of credentials. If this wasn't an attack, then I've misinterpreted it. My apologies if that is the case.

It wasn't the case... notice the use of the "sarcasm" tags. Those were specifically put there to show that I was rolling my eyes at the whole "credential" thing.

Quote:I made no such claims as to the clarity or exactness of my definitions. [snip] Go back and read my original post and please point out where I claimed that my definition was 'crystal clear', if you believe otherwise.

You told me I was "wrong" with the added implication that anyone who says otherwise is incorrect as well.

Quote:Original post by InnocuousFox
(Interestingly, other people came in to post in support of my definition - or rather my summation of the definition as held by many in the industry.)

Quote:You keep mentioning this 'many in the industry', yet you had to pull a few quotes off google

I didn't "have to" do anything. That was an idle search just for the sake of saking.

Quote:... which you clearly misrepresent through your own lack of knowledge of the depth of literature in this field - and claim that these quotes support your comments because someone else agreed with you.

I didn't misrepresent anything. I copied and pasted them complete with links to the original source. It wasn't a bloody thesis, Timkin. Get over it.

Quote:

Quote:Original post by InnocuousFox
I can't seem to find how I was dismissing anyone or anything -

To quote you form your first post in this thread:

Quote:"Emergent behavior" is really just a fancy way of saying "a coincidence that really looked cool"

This is particularly dismissive of what EB is and of the years of work that has gone into understanding it; particularly since most literature describes EB as not coincidence, but rather something that arises from evolution or design.

And again, I clarified later that I was speaking soley in terms of the game development world and how the term is used colloquially in that world. (Note that my reporting of this usage has been backed up by others in this thread... and yet you seem to be "dismissing them.)

Quote:Ask Craig Reynold's how many different rules and combinations he had to try before he found 3 that gave him flocking behaviours! It certainly wasn't a coincidence that those three gave him the that behaviour. He chose those rules exactly because they DID provide that behaviour.

This is so incredibly irrelevant to the conversation that it is ludicrous. I never in this post dismissed any research. Notice that I didn't say that arriving at these algorithms is a random collection of events and coincidences. Sheesh... it is amazing what you manage to read into things!

Quote:

Quote:Original post by InnocuousFox
just merely passing along an observation of how the term is often used in our industry

Ah, so it's your industry?

our: The plural nominative case of the pronoun of the first person; the word with which a person in speaking or writing denotes a number or company of which he is one, as the subject of an action expressed by a verb.

Therefore, at a minimum, YOU and I become "we". The posessive of "we" is "our". Certainly I was including far more than you and I, but the term still relates. YOU were the one who then claimed it was "your industry" (meaning "my" industry). It was YOU who removed YOURSELF from the collective posessive pronoun that I used. Why is this hard?

Quote:It's not an industry in which academics participate and contribute?

I claimed nothing of the sort.

Quote:Are you claiming that all games technology is developed and implemented in games companies, or consulting firms like yours?

I claimed nothing of the sort.

Quote:Certainly, most games are implemented in said companies... but where do you think they get the technology from?

I never claimed anything to the contrary of this point.

Quote:Of course, as is often seen in the industry, someone using the technology doesn't mean that they understand it. Look at ANNs as a perfect example.

This is irrelevant to the topic.

Quote:Further to this, you think that anyone that doesn't put a sig in their post with a company name in it doesn't work in your industry! Now THAT'S presumptive.

I claimed nothing of the sort.

Quote:Actually Dave, you go out of your way to bash those with credentials, particularly those working in academic or research areas.

I do nothing of the sort. (more later)

Quote:Anyone on the receiving end of your long-standing disgruntled attitude to these people certainly has a right to feel attacked, because it's not a one-off event with you... it's something you continually raise whenever you get the chance. You're so hung up on attacking people who have credentials that you forget that having them actually means something in the real world.

Putting aside the point that you have implied a helluva lot of motive on my part, you are missing the point of the times that I have "bashed" here. Those are largely the situations where someone comes in asking for a simple, introductory answer to something which he/she/it may be attempting for the first time - and they are answered by some with the most complicated, involved, high-level, doctoral, cutting-edge techniques. They are blown away... not that the material, in and of itself, is incorrect or not useful... but that, to the person in question, it IS useless. My complaint is always that people need to have a sense of scope on this board - not only of size and complexity for the issue at hand (AS MEASURED BY THE SKILLS OF THE PERSON ASKING THE QUESTION IN THE FIRST PLACE), but of what is appropriate for the genre as a whole. Among some, that level of perception is often significantly lacking.

This is NOT an academic AI board.
This is NOT an AI R&D board.
This is NOT a board where the participants have taken the pre-requisite courses.

Quote:Of course, you also like attacking people that don't know anything (the so-called 'noobs' who visit this site).

I don't recall doing this. What I do, on occassion, is ask them (and others) to qualify their questions a little better - or to take their focus away from the "tool selection" and pay more attention to "problem definition". Attack? I don't think so.

Oh, and "Mr. Theory & Research"... surely you know that it's not correct to continue to make assumptions regarding something of which you have no direct knowledge. You would lose points for the continual use of phrases like "you also like". Unless you have some method of caputuring me giggling away as I type the alleged offending posts, you don't know a damn thing about what "I like", motives, etc. Please, since I trust that you are making an effort to approach this logically, stop making statements that only serve as an attempt to color perceptions of my participation here.

Quote:Perhaps you just like denigrating people for what they do or don't know.

And perhaps you like typing 10,000 word responses to people with questions along the lines of "how do I make my tank move?" Shall we analyze YOUR motives in doing that or simply report on the group perception of the altitude of your nasal intakes above the mean surface level of the sea?

Quote:This is not the first thread in which you've made remarks about people using definitions too much... or snide comments like 'fine-tuning their little definitions or theorems'.

Yep. It's also not the first thread in which it happened that people used them too much. We seem to have found a cause/effect link.

Quote:You also continually accuse people who use definitions of not actually doing anything useful in industry.

Actually I seem to recall pointing out that endless rehashing of what a definition "should be" doesn't do anything useful in the thread meant to answer a production question rather than a theoretical one. There is a large difference.

Quote:Your comments about 'our industry' and the 'land of academia' make it perfectly apparent that you think its an 'us (you) versus them (academics)' war and that simply because you make games (a game) that you must be right.

Since I had to point out to you the flawed premise of your interpretation of my use of English pronouns, this is no longer relevant.

Quote:There is no us versus them. There are a lot of people working on similar problems from different perspectives, often with different aims, but generally with similar techniques. Definitions should be universal (but generally aren't, mostly do to misunderstanding or misrepresentation).

I have never contested this point. You are in error if you believe that I have.

Quote:Since you're obviously ignorant of what each of us here has done and is doing, perhaps you should stop making such ignorant and blatantly rude comments suggesting that we are 'doing nothing'.

Again, my contention is that there is a paucity of "scope awareness". My "rude comments" simply are observations that the disussions occasionally take on an intellectual elitist air that has little to do with the root purpose of the thread. In your shock and amazement that you have gone way over the heads of the original posters, you can get quite offensive as well, sir.

Quote:Interestingly enough, rather than simply challenge my initial response and ask me to produce references to back up my statements/definitions, you chose to cast aspersions about people who use definitions.

Unfortunately, I did not record all the roundtables, lectures, panels and discussions that I attended at GDC. That would be convenient. Thankfully, there are some who have come to this very thread to point out that their understanding and observation of the subject matches mine. On the whole, however, I didn't really give a crap about "proving" anything to you. I, for one, wasn't writing a research paper on the subject so I didn't figure I needed to have a freakin' bibliography and footnotes. Again, get over it.

Quote:Perhaps we should turn the spotlight on you Dave and ask you what YOU are doing in the AI or Games industry, other than still making that same airport game (which by your own admission doesn't use AI but rather a few tuned response curves and mathematics).

If you like... but that is hardly relevant here, is it? Incidentally, I can't remember claiming that my game doesn't use AI. I suppose it depends on you God damn definition of Artificial Intelligence, doesn't it? *sigh*

Writing the AI to generate the best possible combination of thousands of flights to/from hundreds of cities using hundreds of aircraft of a dozen different types, speeds, ranges and capacities all the while taking into account time zones, prevailing winds, airport curfew hours, passenger departure/arrival time travel patterns, the need for connecting flight banks at hubs, taking into account limited gate space, airport arrival/departure traffic limitations AND the Great Bloody Circle Route... is no small task. Of course, some of the people here were awful bloody impressed by the first cut of AI that I had written - when the actually freakin' saw it.

Quote:Have you published any peer-reviewed articles, or developed any new algorithms or techniques of note? Have you contributed anything useful to the body of knowledge held by the field? Given a presentation at a professional conference? Actually implemented any AI that has had to survive in the real world? Is your entire contribution to this field merely that you log into this site occasionally and offer up spurious information, flippant comments and abuse? It certainly appears that way... and according to your standards, that's enough to judge someone by. Perhaps we should just judge you as 'not doing anything useful' and make snide comments about people from the 'land of Intrinsic Algorithm'.

I'm sorry... which of those was a requirement for calling a spade a spade? Which one of those little check-boxes of yours was a requirement, without which I would be disqualified from proposing how to do the AI for shot selection in pool? Simulating stock market fluctuations and particpant buying/selling behavior? What do I have to get published/approved in order for me to have a damn good algorithm for AI player bidding strategies in Texas Hold'em poker? My stuff works. It works well. 'Nuff said.

Quote:Or perhaps, for something unique, you might try arguing a point based on its merits, rather than denigrating your opponents.

Sorry that I have to denigrate your last statement... but now you are just being rediculous.

That actually clarifies quite a bit. Shall we term this phenomenon "definition drift"?

From "AI Game Development" by our pal Alex J. Champandard, Chapter 43, page 584:

Quote:A Definition of Emergence

Emergence can be tricky to define, because capturing all the intuitive examples of emergence with a single plain-English definition is difficult. Here's a reasonable definition - even if overly generic:

Emergence occurs when complex patterns arise from simple processes combined in a straighforward fashion.

A few examples help illustrate emergence in a more intuitive fashion. In each case, low-level rules cause patterns in the higher-level behavior:

** The movement patterns created by a flock of birds, a school of fish, or a group of cyclists. Locally, the individuals avoid each other while staying close, but the groups coordinate to flow smoothly around obstacles.

** The evolution of intelligence to increase changes of survival is a pattern that arises from the maniupulation of genes.

** Neural networks produce high-level cognition from collections of simple neurons.

** Daily trading drives patterns in the economy.

** The flow of traffic based on the desire of individuals in their automobiles.

Although these examples provide insight into emergence, they also open up gray areas. The next section investigates these issues, and the following subsections present the types of emergence.

(If you want more, buy the book.)

Now... I repost my initial comment here:

Quote:"Emergent behavior" is really just a fancy way of saying "a coincidence that really looked cool". If you build an agent based model where each agent is thinking for itself using rules to define it's own behavior, sometimes these agents may do things that seem to be working with each other. In fact, there IS no cooperation happening - each agent is only secondarily aware of the other agents (if that), but they have started to do things "near" each other that makes them look like they are cooperating.

With a simple flocking behavior, this can be seen as each "boid" doing it's own thing... (i.e. the rules for moving with the world objects but not coliding with the world objects) and yet the perceived result is that they are moving "together".

In RTS games, there is a high degree of perceived emergent behavior. This happens when simple rules for each agent (unit) is designed in such a way that it tends to compliment other units' simple rules.

Aside from the flipant use of the word "coincidence" - which I already acknowledged and apologized for - what is the problem with what I said? It sounds an awful lot like what ol' A.J. said... and he's a published author ( <-note credential). Add him to the list behind people like Will Wright and Peter Molyneux. (I don't know if they have written books or not... but you may have heard of them anyway.)