Reading 1

One of the passages that stood out to me from the reading is the section about Artificial Intelligence.  The purpose of this passage is to help explain Automation, one of Manovich’s five principles of new media.  Automation is the removal of human interaction from the creative process, as computers can finish the job for us.  Artificial Intelligence is “the part of the game’s computer code that controls its characters.”  This made me wonder whether or not video games are art.  Basically it is the non player controlled characters that react to what the player is doing.  If your playing a racing game and driving on the left side of the road, the AI will know to pass you on the right side.  If your playing a first person shoot and hiding behind a wall the AI will know to walk around the wall to get to you.  All of these things are made possible thanks to AI.  It makes games feel much more dynamic and fluid as the computer controlled characters react to what you do.  The passage talks about how these AI controlled characters function very effectively in their well-defined but narrow area of expertise, but cannot do anything else.  In order to function properly they need to have set parameters that cannot be broken.  These characters can’t act like humans in every way but instead try to trick us into believing that they’re real by only interacting with us when they are doing what makes them seem most real.  The reason this passage stood out to me was because it made me think of something I learned in a different class called the Turing test.  This test tries to see if a machine could fool a human into thinking their talking to another person.  And if the participant thinks that they are then the machine has passed the test.