Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The news-owls at VG247 spotted that there’s a video (below) of Gabe Newell’s recent talk at the University of Texas. In it he covers a wide range of issues relating to games, and particularly to Steam – discussing things such as the market for Team Fortress 2 hats. But what is perhaps most remarkable is that around 44 minutes, he talks about the problem of Steam being a curated store, and goes on to suggest that Valve are a bottleneck for publishing on the platform, and then even more radically, that they should remove themselves from the equation entirely: “So rather than having this curated store we’re going to say, “OK if we are thinking about this correctly, it really should be sort of a network API.” There should be this publishing model – and yes you have to worry about viruses and malware and stuff like that – but essentially anybody should be able to publish anything through Steam.”

That’s a download from the future right there. And there’s plenty more. Go watch it.
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Phys are reporting that a University Of Texas team won a $7000 in a competition to create game bots that would pass as human. “The winning bots both achieved a humanness rating of 52 percent. Human players received an average humanness rating of only 40 percent. The two winning teams will split the $7,000 first prize,” says the Phys report. “When this ‘Turing test for game bots’ competition was started, the goal was 50 percent humanness,” the bot’s creator, Risto Miikkulainen, is quoted as saying. “It took us five years to get there, but that level was finally reached last week, and it’s not a fluke.” The bot mimicked humans by pursuing grudges, having poor aim at long range, and by using neural networks to “evolve” the bot’s behaviour towards something that would be optimal in the game’s environment.

Does anyone know of any games that use bots for language responses? I can’t think of any offhand, but it must be going on, and there must be an intriguing state of the art for the “real” Turing Test in games.