My jaw dropped, but Susie quickly pulled me back along the route to the market. The badger man had been a computer-generated non-player character the whole time, but I could have sworn he'd been another human player.
"That was an AI?" I spluttered.
She nodded. "I'd have told you earlier but it seemed like you'd heard about all this stuff before. The AI learns from players and builds characters based on people's responses. It uses a player conversation database to build realistic language and gesture patterns."
"So if everyone in the game started calling a street a banana, the AI would too?"
"Not exactly. The back end also monitors outside images, text, and audio to build correlative libraries. So a character with an English accent will say 'trackie,' 'kit,' or 'trainers' instead of 'warm-ups,' 'gear,' or 'sneakers.' I met a hobbit shopkeeper yesterday with a perfect Ontario accent."
"That's unbelievable."
"Well, how else could they build all this into the game? There's not a development team in the world that could create all this content for a game launch. They had to delegate some of the details to smart AI at some point."
"So, how do you know if you're talking to an AI or a real person?"
"You don't always, but in his case you can tell because of the job he's doing. No player would want to sit in the market buying badger pelts all day."
She frowned for a moment before continuing. "You know, everybody likes to give Lance Quaid all the credit for this place, but without the coding team, none of this would have been possible. He's just the vision guy."
While I wanted to be an artist, Susie was interested in math and electronics. Living in the shadow of Redmond, she grew up scavenging computer parts and attending summer camps for kids who liked to tinker. When I couldn't get to sleep at night, I could usually rely on catching her online, working on some project or another.
"The guys who coded the smart AI software are the real geniuses," she grumbled. "Not that they get the recognition."
As an avid coder, this was a regular pet peeve of hers. Fortunately, we found ourselves back in the chaos and distraction of the market before she could really get going.
