... and since you're not going to tell us anything about project Dimitri, I thought I'd re-post a paper I'm sure we've all seen before, Richard Evans' and Thomas Barnet Lamb's GDC 2002 paper on Implementing Wittgenstein.
Heh heh. I remember back when I was at the media lab we were all a little shocked by this approach -- surely this technique of modeling the agents as SECONDARY to the activities they participate in violates the sacred agent/world abstraction barrier (which is the only thing that lets virtual robotics researchers like us sleep at night). Of course we didn't understand the first thing about the practicalities of full-fledged game AI system at the time, and now that I've been working on commercial games for a couple years, I find myself throwing principle out the window on a regular basis.
But maybe the BEST thing about this article is that it starts with the philosophy of Witgenstein and Heidegger and ends with pseudocode. I love that about our field: nowhere else does pie-in-the-sky philosophy have such immediate, practical influence! Marvin Minsky likes to say that "the problem with philosophers is that they never build anything." This is true, because as soon as they do we start calling them AI programmers. Look at what happened to you, Adam!
Posted by naimad at July 14, 2005 12:34 AMDamian, this post is uncannily accurate at turning over interesting rocks, both regarding Lionhead, Richard Evans, my own life, and project Dimitri :)
Minsky's "the problem with philosophers is that they never build anything" is one way of describing why I got out of academic philosophy in the first place, and into new AI approaches at Sussex University. It's also one way of describing why I got out of academic new AI and into the games industry! It's also one of the main things discussed at my interviews for the position at Lionhead, with Richard Evans. I think we discussed Heidegger for half an hour at that interview!
Despite putting more and more distance between myself and academic philosophy, this whole personal journey remained motivated by the early work of Heidegger. It's also fair to say that phenomenological theory of one sort or another continues to heavily influence both my personal life and my work every day.
Posted by: Adam at July 14, 2005 02:41 AMHeh, count me in for a 'me too'. :) I cut my teeth on Heideggerian robotics - emphasizing behavior as primary to abstract reasoning, specialization in many specific tasks over single general problem-solving machinery, primacy of perception over abstract representation, etc. Hell, even my work on communication and social interaction is based *completely* on these principles. :)
And I've come to love that artificial intelligence is very much an 'applied philosophy'. Nowhere else are ontological and epistemological assumptions about the world so quickly delivered to their logical conclusions, their boundaries explored, and their validity questioned.
It's good to see so many continentalists in the community. Gives me hope that maybe it's not an insane perspective after all. ;)
Posted by: Rob at July 20, 2005 05:48 PM