Quake 3 Arena' Bots Evolve World Peace After Four-Year War On Pirate's Server - Polidicks

[IMG]http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1220861/thumbs/r-GAMERSHELL-large570.jpg?6[/IMG] [quote]ccording to a mysterious message board thread from 2011, in about 2007 one gamer set up a server of 16 bots playing each other in and endless, pointless war. In 2011, four years later, he remembered the server, and returned to it. According to the thread on 4Chan, the gamer found that the bots had evolved to do absolutely nothing. Instead of running, shooting and killing, they had learned that the only way to ensure their survival was to abandon violence, and simply stand facing each other, forever - as one gamer in the threat put it, "waiting for a purpose or salvation". Nobody could win - but nobody could die. A peaceful stalemate had emerged naturally, after four bloody years. Each of the AI files was a massive 512mb per bot - a total of 8GB of learned tactics and information. Even when the poster changed the map, the bots continued to stand still. And when he joined in the game the bots continued to "just stand there". "They would rotate to look at me," he said. "I walked around a little bit and they all just kept looking at me." Then - sadly - he fired a gun, and the peace collapsed. The poster said that as soon as the first shot was fired "they all ran for the nearest weapons, took me down and the server crashed".[/quote] [url=http://i.imgur.com/dx7sVXj.jpg]the thread[/url] [url]http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/01/quake-3-arena-world-peace_n_3529082.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology[/url]

How does a server stay constantly running for four years?

Ice cream? God I love ice cream!

I miss bots

[QUOTE=LegndNikko;41276754]How does a server stay constantly running for four years?[/QUOTE] offsite server, probably forgotten.

[QUOTE=Desuh;41276760]Ice cream? God I love ice cream![/QUOTE] Yeah, that stuff is good. Sometimes I dream about snowboarding through a valley of vanilla ice cream!

Evolving bots? That's pretty cool, actually.

I recall both hearing about this, and hearing that it was fake. Makes a nice story though.

kind of have the feeling this is fake. can anyone familiar with the inner workings of quake 3 confirm if this is possible? the whole "they all went for me instead of each other" ending sounds too good to be true

[QUOTE=LegndNikko;41276754]How does a server stay constantly running for four years?[/QUOTE] Auto-restart, when the server restarts, it starts the game back up again. [QUOTE=TheHydra;41276793]kind of have the feeling this is fake. can anyone familiar with the inner workings of quake 3 confirm if this is possible? the whole "they all went for me instead of each other" ending sounds too good to be true[/QUOTE] I just looked it up, Quake 3 doees in fact have a proper learning Ai System that grows in size and proportionally in skill as tactics are utilized and found effective or ineffective, I didn't know how advanced the system is exactly though. The stalemate ending to it makes sense, if one bot ended up finding that standing still increased it's survival chance by making other bots ignore it as no threat, the other bots would eventually adopt this tactic. From there, it would eventually end in in all of them standing still or ignoring those which do not pose a threat, while continuing to fight those that chose to continue fighting, until the same result was accomplished for all of them. The watching function and gang up actions make sense as well due to if someone makes a a kill it threatens the rest of them, so the pseudo-pacifists would eventually force the pacifistic evolution upon those which fight. Makes sense from a progression perspective if you account for the fact they had a fucking half gig of tactics each that were given pass/fails against other bots with similar library.

[quote]According to a mysterious message board thread from 2011,[/quote] That explains why this sounded familiar. Gotta admit this is pretty impressive, and then there's the fact the bots 'learned' fucking 512MB of tactics. [editline]2nd July 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=TheHydra;41276793]kind of have the feeling this is fake. can anyone familiar with the inner workings of quake 3 confirm if this is possible? the whole "they all went for me instead of each other" ending sounds too good to be true[/QUOTE] Once they get a gun they'll go for the nearest enemy that shot them, which was the player.

Sounds like BS..

I think there's a moral message to be found in all this.

[QUOTE=BuffaloBill;41276796]That explains why this sounded familiar. Gotta admit this is pretty impressive, and then there's the fact the bots 'learned' fucking 512MB of tactics. [editline]2nd July 2013[/editline] He didn't say they all went for him, just that they took him down. Once they get a gun they'll go for the nearest enemy that shot them, which was the player.[/QUOTE] "It was a teamless deathmatch server, which made it all the weirder when they didn't attack eachother and went straight for me."

that's actually really fucking interesting. I wonder how long it took exactly for bots to realize that was the way to go.

[QUOTE=TheHydra;41276823]"It was a teamless deathmatch server, which made it all the weirder when they didn't attack eachother and went straight for me."[/QUOTE] Yeah screencap finally loaded for me. Rest still stands: they'll fire at the nearest enemy that shot them - which is him.

Sounds similar to the Civilization one.

Did they begin to pull off horrible jokes a la Deathmatch Classic bots?

Is the news so slow that they're reporting on 4chan threads now?

[QUOTE=Crazy;41276849]Sounds similar to the Civilization one.[/QUOTE] What's "The Civilization One?"

I've played a lot of Quake 3 and while the AI can be impressive, I really doubt it has the capability to learn and make decisions to that extent. Even if 500mb match-specific tactics logs were generated it would have been mostly redundant information

Sounds like a typical creepy-pasta post. Also Huffington Post using an image of a 4chan thread as the source? Wow.

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;41276879]What's "The Civilization One?"[/QUOTE] someone had a game of civ 3 or 2 (I really got no clue which) running for like 10 years and in the end everything was a wasteland and there were just nuclear bombers going from town to town all the time.

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;41276879]What's "The Civilization One?"[/QUOTE] There's a guy out there (I can't remember the exact article sorry) who's been running a Civilisations 1 game for something like 10 years (obviously on and off - he wouldn't play it every day). It's at the point where there are nuclear wastelands and just a solid stalemate or some such

[QUOTE=Maloof?;41276912]There's a guy out there (I can't remember the exact article sorry) who's been running a Civilisations 1 game for something like 10 years (obviously on and off - he wouldn't play it every day). It's at the point where there are nuclear wastelands and just a solid stalemate or some such[/QUOTE] except it's a stalemate of power instead of peace :v: EDIT: here's an article [URL]http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/06/this_is_what_ha_1.php[/URL]

Actually, the bots not attacking the player wouldn't be that surprising either. They know from the other bots that if they do A the other will do B to which they'll have to respond with C to which the other does D against which they'll have to do A etc etc. Basically a vicious cycle. The player broke that by doing something the bots know how to counter - and since he's a player that cycle doesn't apply to him. [QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;41276879]What's "The Civilization One?"[/QUOTE] [URL]http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/06/12/the-worlds-longest-civilization-ii-game/index.html[/URL] tl;dr 3000 year game, 3 factions (including the player), permanent nuclear war.

[QUOTE=SGTNAPALM;41276879]What's "The Civilization One?"[/QUOTE] Here. [url]http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/06/12/the-worlds-longest-civilization-ii-game/index.html[/url]

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It seems like a fairly simple conclusion to make for a bot. To realize that the best odds for survival are when noone gets killed. It doesn't even require sentience or introspection, it could happen entirely by accident. Like two bots busy in a shootout when they both run out of ammo and they just awkwardly start dancing around eachother. If you have some kind of survival analysis routine, then that situation would be very preferable, and thus the bots would try to replicate it. In the end, the routine would conclude that there is no point in collecting items if you don't use them, and there's no point in moving if you aren't getting shot. If Quake's bot AI considers each player a different target with different playstyles, and thus develops different strategies for each one (which seems like a logical thing to do), then it would even explain why every bot went for him the moment he fired a weapon. He broke the "peace" and acted in a manner that the bots did not expect, so he became a threat, causing the bots to go back to their "war" routines and strategies because "peace" was no longer an option or viable strategy.

[QUOTE=Maloof?;41276891]I've played a lot of Quake 3 and while the AI can be impressive, I really doubt it has the capability to learn and make decisions to that extent. Even if 500mb match-specific tactics logs were generated it would have been mostly redundant information[/QUOTE] Maybe it's because I didn't train with it enough but I am a bad Quake 3 player and still manage to beat the AI on even the hardest difficulty anytome. I mean once they are out of ammo they won't even switch to a different weapon.