At the Ubisoft Developer Conference in Montreal, the company introduced an artificial intelligence that aims to detect programming errors before they occur. Other systems have already been implemented in Watch Dogs 2 and the upcoming Far Cry 5.
Recently, Ubisoft presented the AI Commit Assistant, which could help developers avoid errors in software in the future. The goal is to identify bugs before they are integrated into the code.
The technology comes from Ubisoft Montreal’s La Forge research and development department, which collaborates with local universities McGill and Concordia. The department’s research aims to advance the field of artificial intelligence as a whole, not just within the gaming industry.
Bugs from Ten Years of Code
La Forge fed the AI Commit Assistant with about ten years of code from the Ubisoft software library. This way, the program should learn where mistakes were made and what corrections were applied. This should allow the AI to predict when a coder makes a similar mistake. By now, the system is reportedly able to recognize six out of ten typical bugs and can signal them, but it still leads to about 30 percent false alarms.
Ubisoft hopes to reduce one of the most expensive and labor-intensive aspects of game design in the future. Eliminating errors is said to require massive teams and can consume up to 70 percent of development costs.
AIs as Development Assistants
In addition to Commit Assistant, Ubisoft is working on other AIs that are supposed to take on specific tasks in games. For example, a program was taught through reinforcement learning, a form of machine learning, that it could achieve its virtual goals more efficiently by following the rules of the digital road, such as braking. This method was later implemented in Watch Dogs 2, making the depiction of San Francisco more realistic and reducing the number of random virtual accidents.
In the upcoming Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has implemented a virtualized version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a psychological theory of the motivating factors for human behavior, for NPC characters.
The AI is meant to provide the characters in the game with motivations for their actions, largely based on Maslow’s pyramid’s self-preservation levels – physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization.
