Artificial Intelligence in games: Looking at Turing's first article on machine intelligence

Let’s take a look at the writings of Alvin Turing on machine intelligence. What does this have to do with Xbox 360 games? A lot, since the very first article on machine intelligence and it’s first paragraph is about a machine playing a game (from “Computing machinery and intelligence “ by A. M. Turing (see links in earlier blog). Turing writes about an imitation game, using no math, I show this in my hottech blog.

If you take a look at the original article by Turing, it is clear that the current academic processes have taken the machine intelligence out of the hands of the people who would be able to make solid use of the artificial intelligence. With the exception of neurosolutions and www.gameai.com, where is the tools that help hobbyists, students and faculty to implement quick AI that helps them to do their searches, etc. Oh sure there are search engines, www.live.com and www.google.com come to mind, and these use artificial intelligence. It is pretty clear to me that Turing was looking for a more simplistic effort that would draw in large communities around building AI. But no, I can find no strong vital community built up around artificial intelligence, and I think that this is a shameful insult to Turing’s memory.

Over the next few weeks I hope that the XNA based game builders will see that the discussion about Turing and artificial intelligence is just a beginning of a series of articles on building simple artificial intelligence systems.