Quote:
Originally Posted by Jay Random
We didn't let computers try to send men to the moon automatically.
Fun fact: Back in the 1970s, David H. Ahl compiled a book with source code for dozens of primitive computer games in BASIC. In 2010, an updated edition of the same book was published – and Ahl wrote a preface mentioning that some of the AI algorithms from those 1970s games were still being used in modern video games, including EA Sports games.
If you've ever wondered why the AI is so crappy in EA games, now you know. The AI that automates your PVR is pretty much exactly the same level of crap.
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Thanks for sharing that. It got me curious and I found the
forward to the 2010 edition. This is probably the part that you're thinking of
Quote:
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Combat, game #28 in this book, carries this strategy one step further. In it, you must allocate your 72,000 troops to the three services: Army, Navy, and Air Force. You then decide which service attacks first and with how many troops—not much different from the logic used in scores of modern games of warfare. Except for the fact that the logic in Combat is contained in about 100 lines of easily deciphered code, it is fundamentally the same logic used in a game like Gears of War.
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Looking at the
source code for that game, I can confidently say that it shares no algorithms with
Gears of War. The only thing it shares is the general problem of troop distribution.
That being said, it is true that algorithms from the 70s and earlier are used all the time in modern games.
A* Search was originally publish in 1968 and is used in many modern games. It's the default pathfinding algorithm used by Unreal Engine. Does that make it bad? No, it's just that we haven't found a general purpose algorithm yet that does a better job. Sure we've got better algorithms for certain problems, like
JPS+ being much faster for uniform static cost grids, or
Bidirectional Search for certain problem spaces.
Now I know next to nothing about PVRs, but I'm pretty confident that there's no AI being used to determine what channel to record, and if there is it has no resemblance to the AI used in games. There's plenty of other reasons for them to suck, and the likely candidate is something boring like the guy programming it doesn't watch sports, so doesn't know how convoluted the blackouts get.