Google Stadia to use AI to predict gamer's actions

[BroliviaWilde]

going with this line of thinking, a game service that plays the game for you?  that sounds like something ubisoft would do as a microtransaction, so you could 'save some time" if you got into the game much later than others

 

also, read that some games could potentially have "less latency" than a beast of a rig running the game locally that is sitting right next to you?

 

I pressed x for doubt

[mr moose]

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

 

 

 

 

[Beskamir]

So it'll be okay on average, awesome when it actually works, and absolute shit when it won't? Hmm this reminds me of the whole frame time thing a couple years back with multiple GPUs where you'd have an excellent frame rate average but every so often frame latency would shoot up and you'd be having a lesser experience than if the frame times were more constant.

 

5 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

Yep, they just hadn't experienced this yet http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nick/aaronson-oracle/ (which is super simple programmatically too so a smarter solution would probably work even better)

[spartaman64]

the only way for google to reduce latency to an acceptable level for everyone is to put servers every few miles which isnt going to happen. maybe they should only target major cities

[Brooksie359]

5 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

 

 

 

 

Nobody is predictable to the accuracy required for this to be effective. Even if it does manage to predict it correctly it saves a negligible amount of latency which in most cases wont outweigh the latency added from the hardware not being local. I laughed when I heard them say it would have less latency than a home gaming PC. There is no way they don't realize that for the majority of people that will not be the case even when it works. 

[Blademaster91]

5 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

the only way for google to reduce latency to an acceptable level for everyone is to put servers every few miles which isnt going to happen. maybe they should only target major cities

Yeah I don't see how this would work anywhere but major cities anyway, in the US you'd need a fiber connection to even have a decent gaming experience with low latency similar to a gaming PC or console.

[Jito463]

6 hours ago, BuckGup said:

I sorta doubt the extent at to which this works. If they can predict a gamers future actions then what's the difference than predicting a persons in the real world. If this is true than we are screwed harder than most thought as Google can now predict the future

 

56 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

My goal now in life is to be predictably unpredictable.

[S w a t s o n]

[Eaglerino]

predictive gameplay isn't new, but i wonder how the famous diablo 2/path of exile desync will be when the AI fails to predict every now and then

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Nobody is predictable to the accuracy required for this to be effective. Even if it does manage to predict it correctly it saves a negligible amount of latency which in most cases wont outweigh the latency added from the hardware not being local. I laughed when I heard them say it would have less latency than a home gaming PC. There is no way they don't realize that for the majority of people that will not be the case even when it works. 

Hence why I said technical realities aside,   We don't know exactly how accurate it has to be in order to reduce computation times.   But more than that, my post was a general observation that people think they are truly random and unpredictable.

[williamcll]

Well if Stadia only has linear story-driven games then this program would be really effective.

[Trik'Stari]

I hope they implement this, and it kills this stupid fucking idea for a service.

[RejZoR]

6 hours ago, comander said:

 

Google would potentially have millions of people's worth of data to go on. 

Can you name a company with more gaming AI and data expertise than Google?

You can't predict the unpredictable. It's just physically impossible. It literally doesn't matter how many jiggabytes of user data they have or expertise in whatever. Netcode interpolation looks bad when it wanders too far away from what will actually happen and you seriously believe anyone can predict the exact position of over 2 million pixels (that's for 1080p which would be expected as baseline and 4K at over 8 million pixels). Because guess what, they aren't only doing motion data. It's whole visual data. Something graphic cards need hundreds of gigabytes of throughput to even materialize in a smooth enough fashion to be usable. Meaning ANY deviation from what is actually happening means you'd have not just motion and actions interpolated but whole visual data. Have fun looking at smudged and blurry image because it would constantly be trying to catch up to what's actually happening. That can work with motion and actions only because they can deviate from the rendered graphics a bit and you won't even notice it unless it actually lags and desyncs entirely. With whole image, you'll clearly see it. It just can't be done. With regular games, input and render is local, motion and actions are transmitted between players and then merged locally. Stadia is local input and remote render. Meaning every motion and action you do needs to first reach Google, they render whatever you're doing and send it your way and it has to reflect exactly what you did, otherwise it'll just be the most horrible experience ever. And they have a problem with that latency. The round trip of your action to Google and back with everything in between involved. It's literally why this streaming games shit never took off and never will unless we'll have Google servers 100m away from homes with max 1ms latency and bandwidth to stream any video quality. But then you're just solving the problem with brute force, not overhyped magical "Ai" buzzword nonsense. And that's exactly the only thing you can do to make streamable gaming actually work. You cannot usably predict the state of 2+ million pixels to enhance user input latency because of distance.

[Bananasplit_00]

now you can blame the AI when you die!  

[DeScruff]

I have to think this tech would primarily be used in Rhythm games which are completely latency dependent, and would probably be the hardest genre to put on Stadia otherwise due to latency concerns.
A game like say... Guitar Hero would could theoretically use this tech because there are limited inputs.

or Crypt of the Necrodancer, a game where you move your character to the beat of the music. Again the inputs are limited, and even then it probably be easy to predict what the next action the player will take based on the limited inputs.

I doubt this tech could be used for the lastest shooter.

[LeSheen]

This principal already gets used in CPU's. It's called branch prediction. 

If anyone wants to read up about it: Branch prediction

 

I can see it be usefull in a lot of singleplayer games. Multiplayer however might be more difficult to pull off. Probably needs to be done serverside, and that's not in googles control. The gamedev should implement this then.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, comander said:

This is literally one of the most predictable things there is, assuming you limit the scope adequately.
You don't have to be perfect. Just OKish some of the time. 

If you want to learn more about how things work this is a really easy course on ML. 

https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

 

They'd use an API.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

 

It's highly unlikely they'd try to pre-calculate the graphics, they'd likely look into things like physics and doing some (not all) tasks that'd be done on a CPU which would help get a bit of an edge since the GPU would be able to be fed data a little earlier.

Think of this as being conceptually similar to speculative execution. You make a few guesses so you can keep on doing work without stopping. You drop the work you've done if your guess was wrong. You don't have to predict everything, just a handful of elements.

Speculative execution has existed for A LONG TIME. 

This is also a case where A LOT of things are either "basically the same as 1 frame ago" or "about what you'd expect based on current trends"

And how will they predict me moving mouse at XY coordinates on screen at exact given time in combination of 10+ buttons on keyboard. You can't predict impossibility lol. There is literally NO  Ai, API or whatever that can ever predict anything like this, ever. And you'd have to predict that WITH graphics, otherwise you're not really solving anything lol. The lag is created because Google needs to wait for what you'll do and then feed you back visual representation of your actions. But everyone thinks Google can somehow predict that. It's impossible. They can have all the user data in this world and infinite computation power and they still cannot predict user actions in real time.

 

Also I know what API and ML is. Machine can learn how you play in general. It cannot ever learn how you'll act exactly at any given time in realtime. Just throwing buzzowords at things and expect them to miraculously work, people have way too high expectations of Ai. Which in majority of cases is nothing but bunch of IF statements that run in a loop and they output data depending on what falls in line with given rules that are present there. Learning part of it is just storing and feeding output data so the looping can comb through what has already encountered before. Programmer still needs to quite specifically create routines that do all this. But people hear "Ai" buzzword and think it's all just sentient intelligence that knows all, does all. Shit like this just doesn't exist yet and won't for many more years to come...

[KnoT]

Spoiler

 

A part from that what Google is stating being total BS...

 

I think you are forgetting that usual button to pixel lag on consoles is usually over 100ms and that's on super fast gaming monitors... But it still doesn't matter as it's fine for most "gamers" just look how many console users there are and they don't see anything wrong with it. I don't think we need to mention USA Internet infrastructure is a mess.

 

Game streaming as video will be BS at least for me until we get some quantum internet with like 1ms encoders and with almost no visual loss.

 

 

PS. 1080p 144hz anyday over 4k 60hz

[LePawel]

erm.. what about mechanics changing based on action taken?

AKA

if I press right I walk into a collision box that triggers a cutscene, if I walk left I don't. You'd need fully rewindable games, and that's not someting anyone is coding for.

You'd need multiple instances running in parallel to the frame. this sounds like a massive resource drain for very little effect. The ultimate diminished return. Lets build a server so I can guess stuff right sometimes.

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

read above.

 

[WereCatf]

13 hours ago, mr moose said:

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

For once, I agree with you. I, personally, know full fucking well I am entirely predictable in a billion ways when it comes to my actions. My hubby would definitely call me predictable, if one was to ask him!

 

Though, my movements aren't all that predictable; I am clumsy and I have some nervous-system issues making many of my movements twitchy and jittery, plus my hands and fingers tremble constantly -- it'd be interesting to see how much of my finger-movements, for example, could actually be predicted and what the curves I mentioned in an earlier post would look like for me. Might have to add that on my todo-list.

[RejZoR]

There is a huge difference between "this player prefers this corridor over the other". Opposed to thi splayer goes exactly through this very path through this corridor and I'm going to predict that he's going to twitch jump around that crate this time". Ie, cannot be predicted. Predicting this is like predicting infinite possibilities and then discarding all that didn't match 60 times a second. Lol much?

[Brooksie359]

4 hours ago, comander said:

This is a relatively small amount of the computation that needs to be done. It can be skipped. 
Why do you think that this component is material vs doing things like calculating scene physics?

 

You don't have to do this. If there's 10 steps to be done before rendering a frame, you can calculate the most time consuming 5 in advance. 

While that was true around 50 years ago and there's still some use in machine learning for what are effectively overglorified IF-Then statements (e.g. RandomForests, Gradient Boosted Trees, etc. - it's also inaccurate to think of them as being in a loop as each tree can be run in any order - also the way the models are built is RADICALLY different, people are not writing if-then statements) the cutting edge stuff generally relies on neural networks which work quite a bit different from that. https://machinelearningmastery.com/gentle-introduction-xgboost-applied-machine-learning/

If you want to criticize neural nets, you can say that it's overglorified curve fitting - NOT if-then statements. 

Here's a visual example of a VERY VERY VERY VERY simple neural network running on a very small amount of data that's very simple. 
https://playground.tensorflow.org/

 

 

 

A lot of the work done these days ends up being data collection/engineering, feature engineering and hyper-parameter tuning. Some work might also be done to ensure things like numerical stability (this was legitimately a HUGE issue 10 years ago) though I can't speak to that issue very well. Same applies to working on computational efficiency (without tanking model performance)... Initialization is also fun.
 

No one who knows their stuff is going to debate that. You can build an "appliance" that does one thing and does it well (like a toaster or microwave) and that's about it here and today. The best we can hope for in the midterm would be an appliance which can choose between appliances. This would not be creativity. The closet thing to creativity would be "trying random stuff during simulations and seeing what works"

If it can only do a portion of the work for rendering a frame by prediction then it will be basically useless. You wont save any significant amount of latency. 

[WereCat]

On 10/10/2019 at 6:06 PM, wkdpaul said:

also, "negative lag / latency" ... pretty click-bait IMO, and I refuse to use that expression! 

With that logic I can become rich by withdrawing a negative amount of money from the ATM. 

[pas008]

23 hours ago, mr moose said:

Technical realities aside,  I find it amusing that people don't think they are predictable.

 

 

 

 

is this going to prefire for you? lol

like you are only 40% accurate at so so range so we prefired with that accuracy

 

hahaha

[mr moose]

9 hours ago, WereCatf said:

For once, I agree with you. I, personally, know full fucking well I am entirely predictable in a billion ways when it comes to my actions. My hubby would definitely call me predictable, if one was to ask him!

 

Though, my movements aren't all that predictable; I am clumsy and I have some nervous-system issues making many of my movements twitchy and jittery, plus my hands and fingers tremble constantly -- it'd be interesting to see how much of my finger-movements, for example, could actually be predicted and what the curves I mentioned in an earlier post would look like for me. Might have to add that on my todo-list.

Some one put a link up about predicting just that.  You type 2 letters as randomly as possible and the computer will try to predict your next move.  it keeps a running tally of accuracy. I did it for a minute and the computer was at 57% accurate (which is statistically speaking just guessing).    So I dare say on that front you would be rather unpredictable unless your stutter caused you to press one button more often.