Left 4 Dead 2

First things first, Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2 at the E3. The game will have plenty of new things over the first:

• A new and improved AI Director 2.0 for even more scary hordes of zombies.
• Many new zombie models (they look better and more dynamic than the ones in the first part, too).
• One new kind of super zombie, the charger.
• Dynamic weather (courtesy of said AI Director 2.0).
• Dynamic pathing through some areas (courtesy of said AI Director 2.0).
• 20 new weapons, among them, melee weapons like baseball bats, chainsaws and frying pans.
• A new setting, in the daytime instead of the night (meaning, few reusable assets).
• New survivors with different backstories and even more dynamic lines of small talk.
• One big campaign, in which the survivors get to know each other, and a feeling of progress throughout the different movie plot scenarios.
• Better Crescendo events that reduce survivor’s ability to exploit closets (I hate closets) by making them have to move.

That certainly does look like a list of changes that is a lot longer than the one you see in an EA sports title, or Call of Duty for that matter. The fact that it’s going to come out November 17th, a mere year after the first? Hooray! Gee, Valve is fast in producing quality content.

More on IGN, they have a preview.

Nerd Rage

Anyway, I promised you that I will also be talking about nerd rage. Well, here you go: There is a Steam group called L4D2 Boycott with now nearly 20k members -- and gee, how unexpected, they call for a boycott of that new shiny new game. I leave you to read the full list of their protest bullet points elsewhere, but want to point out that among the things those folks hate so much are the new music and “the game is too bright”.

Funny enough, the same folks also complain that L4D wasn’t worth its money for them. That is, after the game got multiple discounts and weekend sales, and many of them probably got it for the price of an indy game. Personally, I got more playtime out of L4D than out of many, many other full price titles, I have no clue what those guys are talking about.

We’re Spoiled

Yes, we’re spoiled. TF2 is awesome and got huge amounts of updates over the past years. New maps, new game modes, new weapons and “meet the …” videos. But what Valve seems to have done for L4D here goes way beyond these updates for TF2. Personally, I trust them enough to believe that when they think it’s worth buying a new game, then it’s worth buying a new game.

And when they say that there will be new content for the first L4D still, then the experience with TF2 made me confident enough in their abilities and their trustworthiness to believe them that as well.

Where the Protesters are Right

It is true, L4D2 could be an expansion. A standalone, tie-in expansion, a bit cheaper for those who already own L4D, with a bundle offer for those who want both.

It is also true that L4D didn’t get a huge lot of added content so far -- although we did get a new gametype, a new map, Valve enabled Versus mode on the remaining two campaigns (which meant reworking them altogether, since infected can reach many places survivors can’t). Still, there could be more. According to Valve, there also will be more -- so what exactly is the problem? Anyway, L4D got slightly less updates than TF2, point acknowledged.

But beyond that? No way. “We want to keep the old characters” and “we don’t want this new setting” and then at the same time “there’s not enough content here to justify a sequel”? That sounds an awful lot like “waah waah” to me.

Update 2009-06-09 19:53: There’s an interview at the Negative Gamer that is well worth the read. Seems that with size, they also changed to the better. Mr.Pancakes:

We changed our manifesto because we wanted to keep it in line with what most people in the community had concerns about. The first manifesto was there from the beginning. It contained our gut reactions to the new game and why we disliked it. But as the community grew, people began to focus their concerns on the content issues with Left 4 Dead 1 and the timing of Left 4 Dead 2, more than the fiddle-music or the visual aspects of Left 4 Dead 2. It became more about Left 4 Dead 1, and many of our members wanted us to drop the complaints about the fiddle-music and the Left 4 Dead 2 aesthetic.

Now if you’ve heard a few of those conversations, you know that Francis hates quite a lot of things. Here’s a little music video that proves it:

Via tons of places, but I think I saw it first on Destructoid.

Hope you enjoyed this little interlude And let me take this opportunity to say that the Zerg post is nearly finished, just lacks pictures, and I’m working on the Terran strategy post today. Guess they’ll both be up in the next 1-2 days.

Update 2009-02-03 10:48: Since I’m already linking random stuff, here’s some L4D Valentine cards. But I’ll try to keep random reposts to a minimum, you know there’s delicious.com for such things

Left 4 Dead

I just got mine today.

Left 4 Dead is coming in roughly four weeks, I’m sure you heard about it. It’s the upcoming post-apocalyptic zombie shooter by Valve, the makers of the awesome Team Fortress 2 and the Half Life series, with raving previews (an extensive preview is here) – everyobdy who played it loves it, it seems.

The Team Fortress 2 guys are working on it as well in these last weeks before release, and there’s a Left 4 Dead Blog meanwhile. With Lego, how cool is that.

It’s got zombies, and tougher boss zombies, and the humans struggle to survive, and there’s some AI stuff going on that tries to match the enemy toughness to the player skill, and generally it looks pretty interesting and great. Anyway. The reason why I’m writing this post is because preorders are open now (on Steam, for example, which is where I got mine), and if you preorder, you also get $5 off. Via Rock Paper Shotgun, and Joystiq.

On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that you’ll hear more about the game in the following weeks, considering Valve plans a $10M ad campaign (via Edge Online). Video games really do have reached the mainstream, don’t you think?

The Chinese Room

When I started preparing for my upcoming diploma thesis about consciousness, the possibility of AI and how it all fits together, I couldn’t help but stop at this thought experiment that the famous and bright philosopher John Searle brought up in 1980.

Few papers are still so disputed after now 25 years (although, this being philosophy we’re talking about, all papers are still somewhat disputed after hundreds of years), and the subject matter is as or more current as it was then: The Chinese Room, brought up in the article Minds, Brains and Programs that was published in the journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences.

In short, the thought experiment that my paper (link further down) tries to shed a light on, goes as follows, synopsis mine and maybe a tad jovial for the subject:

There is a thinking homunculus in a room who doesn’t understand Chinese, but has an elaborate set of rules gouverning his actions.

He receives pieces of paper from scientists on the outside, with Chinese symbols, processes them with his rules and paints other Chinese symbols that he returns to the outside – without understanding a thing.

Now the scientists outside cackle with glee, for they think they have crafted a machine that, by merely following rules, can understand Chinese.

However, so Searle argues, since the homunculus on the inside doesn’t understand Chinese, the whole machine can’t possibly understand Chinese (as there is no single part that does the understanding). From this and the similarity from this to any other machine, he follows that no machine can possibly have true understanding and as such, strong AI (that he defines as truly understanding) cannot exist.

OK, so … is he right? Is (strong) AI research doomed?

There are of course several answers to this, quite different in both approach and consequences:

• Yes, he’s right. Now, that would be boring, and if I’d believe this I wouldn’t have written this blog post nor the paper it’s about.
• We don’t even want strong AI research, what Searle deems “weak AI” is actually a huge feat and more than enough for all our wishes. Which Searle doesn’t deny by the way, he didn’t mean to diminish the value of “weak AI” by calling it “weak” (which I can’t help but find a tiny bit funny) and respects advances.
• Searle seems to underestimate the complexity of the required rules, and believes that we can wrap our heads around a machine with millions of moving parts consisting of pipes and flows of water. While I do think that we can’t due to too limited mental capacity, I do believe that Searle is aware of that restriction of ours and, as he makes clear himself, believes in a matter of principle that doesn’t change with growing system complexity.
• His argument is fundamentally flawed and looking for the smallest atomic bit of understanding (or, as he later specifies, the non-reproducible biological-causal properties of the human brain that a computer can’t have by matter of principle and material) is the wrong approach in the first place. Searle basically dismisses this because he finds it ridiculous and contradictory to common sense.

Myself, I like to put myself into the last of those camps. Particularly because I don’t believe in such a thing as “common sense” being actually common, or even a guideline towards truth.

For all those approaches trying to disprove him, Searle thinks he showed they’re wrong – and with most of his rebuttals, I’ll have to admit that I agree with him wholeheartedly. However, there are a few points where I strongly disagree despite all due respect for one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

And those points are where my paper regarding that subject comes into play:

The Chinese Chatroom

I try and figure out which arguments can be found in which ones of the various answers that said article provoked already upon the time of its release (and in particular those that were printed in the same issue of the journal), research what the Turing Test and (even more so) the Turing Machine are really about, and how the question and possibility of simulation versus replication of causal effects come into play.

I’m quite convinced that if what the current perception of the Turing Machine as “a machine to replicate all machines” is correct (which I know hasn’t been mathematically proven), there is no such thing as a fundamental problem with us eventually getting to the point where we do or at least can have strong AI, with machines that are very similar in functionality (albeit probably necessarily much more powerful) to today’s computers.

I’ll have to add that since I wrote this paper, I read quite a bit more about some subjects that appear in the paper, and meanwhile I could add more references to philosophers (in particular, Daniel Dennett) who share views similar to mine and have developed them a lot further than I could so far.