Comments on: New Dissertations on AI-Based Interactive Art, Character and Narrative

By: michael

michael — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 19:30:49 +0000

It’s not just an issue of building on each other’s work. There’s also the issue of doing the research in the context of creating produced experiences. I’ve long argued that in Expressive AI research, the AI research must be done in the context of building specific interactive art and entertainment experiences. Pushing on concrete experiences generates AI research questions that wouldn’t come up otherwise. In fact, you don’t even know if you’re asking interesting research questions and building relevent architectures unless you’re doing it in the context of a concrete experience. The challenge of course is to conceptualize interactive experiences that really require significant steps forward in AI, while not requiring impossible, AI-complete solutions. I’ve seen research work in Expressive AI founder on both sides: either prototype experiences that could have been built by dusting off some finite state machines or simple rule engines, and thus do not push the AI in interesting directions nor provide a compelling case for the more complex solution, or prototype experiences that make very broad claims about extremely hard problems, but where the prototype itself offers an extremely simple solution that falls far short of the broad claims. The latter problem can come up quite easily in interactive story research, because of how hard the problem is.

By: andrew

andrew — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 15:44:35 +0000

Good points; a couple of comments. Research efforts such as these are disparate sometimes, but sometimes build upon each other, if not by literally sharing code, at least by influencing each other in approach or conceptualization. Also, I think it's safe to say that, in the big picture, researchers / artists / game developers are still in the early stages of trying to understand how to apply non-trivial AI to art and entertainment; it makes sense that there will be a wide variety of experiments and approaches. Most researchers / artists / game developers still "roll their own". But I agree with you, I'd hope over time we'd start to see people building upon each other's work more. They're going to need to, to make more substantial progress. For example, Facade builds directly upon a decade of pioneering work by the Oz Project researcher/artists, in particular the work of Joe Bates, Bryan Loyall, Scott Reilly, Peter Weyrauch, and Brenda Laurel (who consulted on Oz), as well as applying some relatively mature forward-chaining rule technology (in our case, we used Jess); and some of the more powerful features of Java (e.g., reflection); those are big reasons why the project was able to achieve what it did. > Has anyone asked [the IF community] what they would like to have? Do we have anything solid to offer them, so they can beat on it for a few years and turn out a couple of dozen works of art? It's the exception, rather than the rule, for a research group to create a user-friendly authoring system of any kind; it's a good deal of extra work (and required skill) beyond the research itself to make the technology / research results that accessible. Processing is probably the best recent example of the kind of thing you're asking for; Alice and AIML are others. ... As we've mentioned in the past, a component of Facade, the behavior language ABL, will be publicly released in the not-too-distant future, free for academic / non-commercial use, but it needs to be hooked up to a world (animated, text, robot, what have you) to be useful. The initial release will have basic hook-ups to the Unreal Tournament world (which may or may not be an artistically fertile world for artists to build in; they may need to do the work to hook it up to other worlds, such as MUDs, other animation engines, their own robots, etc.).

By: Malcolm Ryan

Malcolm Ryan — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 10:58:31 +0000

I’m reading through these theses and I’m quite impressed with the new technology, but I also feel a growing unease. I am worried that the technical side of things is outstripping the artistic side. System after system seems to be being built with little evaluation. One or two proof-of-concept works are generated, and then the system is shelved, in favour of the next.

I fear that without having a group of authors attempt real work with any particular engine (over several years), we are never really going to know what is good or bad about a particular technology, and how it could realisticly be improved. I worried that so much effort is spent buidling “the next great thing” which fixes the perceived flaws of what came before, based on scanty evidence of what those flaws are or how they should be fixed.

Meanwhile, the artists in the IF community are truly pushing the limits of their tools (traditional adventure game engines). Has anyone asked them what they would like to have? Do we have anything solid to offer them, so they can beat on it for a few years and turn out a couple of dozen works of art?

Malcolm

By: alt_imagen

alt_imagen — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 22:54:02 +0000

Autonomous Expressionism and Network Arts:

New Paradigms in Art, Emotional Interaction, and Information Retrieval “Abstract: In this dissertation, I depart from traditional computer science metrics and methodologies and introduce a new framework for building computer systems with an emphasis …