How Isaac NPC Control works

Since Isaac has its roots in machine learning and unsupervised pattern recognition, it is quite different from 'conventional' Artificial Intelligence algorithms that are used in Games. That is also reflected in its interface, and while both can control non-playable characters (NPCs) in games, there are some commonalities, but also stark differences. Let's start with the commonalities.

Isaac needs to know about the world it lives in. Isaac doesn't have eyes or ears, so it needs to constantly be updated from the game (engine) about what is happening in its surroundings. One difference to game AI right there is that the game needs to continue its information flow even if the NPC is outside of the range of human players, since it needs the compute cycles to think about its strategies and goals, but what it has in common that it needs the location and qualities of objects (obstacle, danger, etc.) and other players in its range. In practical terms, this necessitates frequent communication with the game engine, as it is implemented for conventional NPC control, which can either be done through navigation meshes or by directly feeding the location of objects. Note, however, that Isaac will not store any map information internally, other than remembering it in its memory, so the information needs to continue to stream in. In return, Isaac will provide a proposed action, for which the game then decides the outcome and communicates it back to Isaac. As s simple example, Isaac is moving forward towards a cactus. Unaware of what a cactus does to him, we will try to run through. The game engine then has to tell Isaac that (a) he was unsuccessful in running through, and (b) it really, really hurt! With this information, Isaac will learn to never do this again. However, he might also figure out that it could be a good strategy to push an opponent into a cactus. 
 
In abstract terms, every object in the game is an entity that has coordinates and a list of properties. Entities are both immovable objects that are part of the map, as well as movable objects that are e.g. controlled by a physics engine, or the players themselves. Note that each instance of Isaac is an entity as well. The game defines the list of properties, where a property has a name and a floating point value. Those can be descriptive properties (e.g. shiny, blue, wet, sticky, tasty etc.) as well as functional ones (e.g. ammo, health, etc.). Coordinates are communicated relative to Isaac's position, which needs to be kept track of by the game. The game also decides which entities are communicated to Isaac, e.g. only entities that are in sight. For NPC control, each Isaac has a list of possible game-defined actions, where each action has again a name and a numerical value (e.g. move forward/back, move left/right, look up/down, shoot gun etc.).

On a technical level, Isaac has a multi-level architecture, with its most basic building blocks being Artificial Neural Networks (Self-organizing Maps, SOM), Hidden Markov Models (HMM), and Non-linear Optimization Methods (NLO). For processing and storing information, Isaac has several types of memory. First, it has a conceptual memory which organizes entities by similarity through a high-dimensional SOM. Note that the organization is influenced by the interaction with the entities, e.g. at that level, it does not matter which color a brick has, but it matters that one needs to jump on it to get over it. For other purposes and other parts of the memory, however, it might matter very well what color a brick has, as it can e.g. serve as a landmark in Isaac's spatial memory. For processing events in temporal order, Isaac has a short-term memory, which consists of multiple layers of SOMs that are each organized in form of a hyper-torus, where information gets "bubbled" through the chain in the order in which they occur, and to increasing degrees of abstraction. A long-term memory complements that component and keeps a two-way communication: information from the short-term memory updates the long-term memory, while a non-linear optimization algorithm searches the long term memory both for predictions of the immediate future, as well as for more long-term strategies, which is done through associating the current situation with situations from the past, allowing for hypothesizing a completely new course of action through combining elements of past experience.


Software and architecture

Isaac is written in C++ and currently runs on Linux and MacOS X.