ECU’s Philip Hingston took the stage to tell us about the comp to build a better bot. 2K Australia (previously known as Irrational Games) is offering a $10,000 prize to the programmer who can make a bot that tricks the panel of judges into thinking it’s a human; kinda like a Turing Test for bots. There will be two groups of human players, the judges, a control group of sample players (who are not novices, but who aren’t crack-shot professionals either) and mixed in with them there will be the AI bots created by entrants.

If the judges can’t distinguish between the play of your bot and the humans, then you win $7000 plus a trip to the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (and the 2K Australia Studios) valued at $3000. If no bots pass the test, the best effort will take home $2000 cash and still grab the trip.

This is a great competition from my point of view. Creating a bot that can headshot anything that moves is simple, but it’s not a great idea. On the fun side, it’s like trying to play tennis against a cannon.

Creating a bot that feels like it has a personality, a play style and emotional motivations is something completely different. It not only offers players a challenge, but gives them a real sense of competition, as they square off against a foe that feels like it has skills that are worth competing against, not just a lucky dip bag of queued cheats and cheap tricks.  A lot of AI research and competitions are serious navel-gazing but this has an immediate commercial outcome which is fantastic.  2K is obviously wanting to interview whomever wins but since their studio is in Canberra and there are now some great options (IZ, BC, SF) for working in sunny Perth, I’ll certainly be in there talking to the winners too.

Incidentally, Perth’s own Jason Hutchens won a similar but more complex competition (the Loebner Prize) while a student at UWA and it certainly helped launch his career in the games industry.  He’s back in Perth at Interzone now and apparently won’t be entering this competition, so it’s an ideal chance for aspiring AI programmers.

The platform for this competition is the modding classic Unreal 2004, and a plug-in is available to simplify the interface and present the game as a TCP socket for your application to interrogate and command. You can check the details at www.botprize.org, but if you want to participate you’ll have to move quickly as the competition closes in November.

Yesterday I was part of a very interesting panel for LA Tech Week that was held out at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA.  Von Johnson organised a diverse group of technolgists with a remarkably wide range of perspectives into the future of screen-based entertainment,  Our remit was “mobile and broadband” which obviously left us a huge realm for discussion.  I was the only game guy in the room so the discussion did tend a little toward film & television but Von did an excellent job of moderating the panel and mixing things up.  Randy Greenberg also set the scene with a very rich and insightful perspective on the how mobile and broadband technologies have already and will continue to work their way into mainstream entertainment.  His analysis seemed to surprise much of the audience, separating distribution medium, content and business model into separate areas of discussion and weighting distinctions in content more by commercial than traditional weightings.  His analysis was so interesting that I wanted to reproduce it here and Randy kindly agreed.  Courtesy of The Greenberg Group you can click for JPG or PDF versions of his powerpoint.The panel discussion was quite lively and we covered a lot of ground, as might be expected from such a diverse group of people.  Apart from me, there was;

• Christopher Carey – CTO and Chief Marketing Officer, Technicolor by Thomson
• Randy Greenberg – President and CEO, The Greenberg Group
• Douglas Hunter – Vice President of Licensing, Dynamic Digital Depth (3D Technology Company)
• Jeremy Laws – Senior Vice President, Universal Mobile Entertainment, Universal Digital Platforms Group
• Elmo Weber – President, Nutshell Media - Content Summarization Software
• Moderator: Von W. Johnson – President and CEO, Von Johnson & Associates, Inc.

I don’t want to paint a detailed summary of all the topics of discussion here as I would not do it justice.  However, some of the interesting points that I took away;

• There will be increasingly complex content-recycling systems that will allow us to enjoy old TV series’ and movies on all of our various devices.
• Hollywood is learning from the music industry’s failures and although not all of the hierarchy “gets” digital on-demand distribution, there are a lot of folks that do and they are working hard to do interesting deals and repurpose or create content to take advantage of the tech.
• Saturday night football looks incredible in 3D and this likely will be the killer app to drive 3DTV into our homes, although we will have to wait for some of the novelty of HDTV to fade before things really get interesting.
• Blu-ray has an online component.  I wasn’t previously aware of this actually so I must read up on it.
• There was some disent but the majority agreed that HD-DVD has failed and Blu-Ray is victorious, so I really need to do that reading and Sony has finally won a format war!
• Very few projects from any significant motion picture company will rest entirely on the box office receipts; film companies are becoming more like IP exploitation companies and are interested in any distribution method that can turn a profit, especially if it has low cost of entry (repurposing content instead of remaking it).
• The strong communities that we’re so good at creating in the game industry are very highly prized by film marketers, whom are increasingly working to create communities that are pre-sold on a movie prior to release.  They aren’t relying on it yet but that is only a matter of time and the right project, presenting an incredible opportunity to the right collaboration of film-maker and game company.